We can all succeed

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2010-06-14T08:30:00.000-07:00

फ्रेकुएंत फीलिंग्स ऑफ़ Tiredness and Anxiety filled

2009-07-18T05:33:00.000-07:00

Depression has become one of the most widely increased diagnosed disorders in this country over the past few years. Things like the falling economy causing a decrease in personal finances, in addition to life’s daily stresses and worries have caused many Americans to become depressed.

Depression has become one of the most widely increased diagnosed disorders in this country over the past few years. Things like the falling economy causing a decrease in personal finances, in addition to life’s daily stresses and worries have caused many Americans to become depressed.

You may have seen the recently advertised television commercials offering depression testing, and lots of net work marketing companies displaying their remedies. Depression not only saddens an individual’s state of mind, but also causes symptoms like fatigue, anxiety and loss of motivation, even in the simplest of daily activities. People who are depressed are not temporarily moody or sad. The condition is unfortunately, long-term and negatively affects the way a person feels, thinks and live his or her life.

Depression is a genuine medical condition that can be treated, but the help has to be sought out. That in itself can often times be a difficult task for someone experiencing this ailment. A Depression Test is important because depression is a disease that requires attention and medical treatment. If it is not treated, it can last for months, and in some cases, even years.

If lately, you've been feeling out-of-sorts for an extended amount of time, you might consider taking a depression test. There are several ways you can go about this. If you don’t feel up to a doctor visit, go online. Visit a website that can offer you a simple questionnaire to decide whether or not you might be clinically depressed. There is a wonderful website called lexapro.com that offers a very good depression test which is in the form of a simple questionnaire. You will also find answers there to any questions you might have about the way you are feeling. Another good web resource is depression.com. Please keep in mind that if your depression test results lead you to believe that you are in fact suffering from depression, you must make an appointment to see a physician and get treatment, there is always a way out.

If you are, or know someone who is suffering from depression, seek help. There is nothing to be ashamed of. You shouldn’t have to live in sadness so don’t continue to let life pass you by. You are valuable part of this world and you deserve to experience the same happiness, if not more as everyone else around you.

senator Barack Obama has become the first African-American to win the White House. Here are his remarks to a huge crowd in his home city of Chicago

2008-11-10T05:07:00.000-08:00

Change has come
If there is anyone out there who still doubts that America is a place where all things are possible; who still wonders if the dream of our founders is alive in our time; who still questions the power of our democracy, tonight is your answer.

It's the answer told by lines that stretched around schools and churches in numbers this nation has never seen; by people who waited three hours and four hours, many for the very first time in their lives, because they believed that this time must be different; that their voices could be that difference.

It's the answer spoken by young and old, rich and poor, Democrat and Republican, black, white, Hispanic, Asian, Native American, gay, straight, disabled and not disabled - Americans who sent a message to the world that we have never been just a collection of individuals or a collection of Red States and Blue States: we are, and always will be, the United States of America.

It's the answer that led those who have been told for so long by so many to be cynical, and fearful, and doubtful of what we can achieve to put their hands on the arc of history and bend it once more toward the hope of a better day.

It's been a long time coming, but tonight, because of what we did on this day, in this election, at this defining moment, change has come to America.
PARTNERS IN THE JOURNEY
A little bit earlier this evening I received an extraordinarily gracious call from Senator McCain. He fought long and hard in this campaign, and he's fought even longer and harder for the country he loves. He has endured sacrifices for America that most of us cannot begin to imagine. We are better off for the service rendered by this brave and selfless leader.

I congratulate him, I congratulate Governor Palin, for all they have achieved, and I look forward to working with them to renew this nation's promise in the months ahead.

I want to thank my partner in this journey, a man who campaigned from his heart and spoke for the men and women he grew up with on the streets of Scranton and rode with on that train home to Delaware, the vice-president-elect of the United States, Joe Biden.

And I would not be standing here tonight without the unyielding support of my best friend for the last 16 years, the rock of our family, the love of my life, the nation's next first lady, Michelle Obama. Sasha and Malia, I love you both more than you can imagine, and you have earned the new puppy that's coming with us to the White House.

And while she's no longer with us, I know my grandmother is watching, along with the family that made me who I am. I miss them tonight, and know that my debt to them is beyond measure. To my sister Maya, my sister Auma, all my other brothers and sisters - thank you so much for all the support you have given me. I am grateful to them.

To my campaign manager David Plouffe, the unsung hero of this campaign, who built the best political campaign in the history of the United States of America. My chief strategist David Axelrod, who has been a partner with me every step of the way, and to the best campaign team ever assembled in the history of politics - you made this happen, and I am forever grateful for what you've sacrificed to get it done.

VICTORY FOR THE PEOPLE
But above all, I will never forget who this victory truly belongs to - it belongs to you.

I was never the likeliest candidate for this office. We didn't start with much money or many endorsements. Our campaign was not hatched in the halls of Washington - it began in the backyards of Des Moines and the living rooms of Concord and the front porches of Charleston.

It was built by working men and women who dug into what little savings they had to give $5 and $10 and $20 to the cause.

It grew strength from the young people who rejected the myth of their generation's apathy; who left their homes and their families for jobs that offered little pay and less sleep; it grew strength from the not-so-young people who braved the bitter cold and scorching heat to knock on the doors of perfect strangers; from the millions of Americans who volunteered, and organised, and proved that more than two centuries later, a government of the people, by the people and for the people has not perished from the Earth.

This is your victory
THE TASK AHEAD
I know you didn't do this just to win an election and I know you didn't do it for me. You did it because you understand the enormity of the task that lies ahead. For even as we celebrate tonight, we know the challenges that tomorrow will bring are the greatest of our lifetime - two wars, a planet in peril, the worst financial crisis in a century.

Even as we stand here tonight, we know there are brave Americans waking up in the deserts of Iraq and the mountains of Afghanistan to risk their lives for us.

There are mothers and fathers who will lie awake after their children fall asleep and wonder how they'll make the mortgage, or pay their doctor's bills, or save enough for their child's college education. There is new energy to harness and new jobs to be created; new schools to build and threats to meet and alliances to repair.
The road ahead will be long. Our climb will be steep. We may not get there in one year or even in one term, but America - I have never been more hopeful than I am tonight that we will get there. I promise you - we as a people will get there.
There will be setbacks and false starts. There are many who won't agree with every decision or policy I make as president, and we know that government can't solve every problem. But I will always be honest with you about the challenges we face. I will listen to you, especially when we disagree.
REMAKING THE NATION
And above all, I will ask you to join in the work of remaking this nation the only way it's been done in America for 221 years - block by block, brick by brick, calloused hand by calloused hand.
ONE NATION, ONE PEOPLE
What began 21 months ago in the depths of winter cannot end on this autumn night. This victory alone is not the change we seek - it is only the chance for us to make that change. And that cannot happen if we go back to the way things were. It cannot happen without you, without a new spirit of service, a new spirit of sacrifice.

So let us summon a new spirit of patriotism; of service and responsibility where each of us resolves to pitch in and work harder and look after not only ourselves, but each other. Let us remember that if this financial crisis taught us anything, it's that we cannot have a thriving Wall Street while Main Street suffers - in this country, we rise or fall as one nation; as one people.

Let us resist the temptation to fall back on the same partisanship and pettiness and immaturity that has poisoned our politics for so long. Let us remember that it was a man from this state who first carried the banner of the Republican Party to the White House - a party founded on the values of self-reliance, individual liberty, and national unity.

Those are values that we all share, and while the Democratic Party has won a great victory tonight, we do so with a measure of humility and determination to heal the divides that have held back our progress. As Lincoln said to a nation far more divided than ours: "We are not enemies, but friends… though passion may have strained it must not break our bonds of affection."

And to those Americans whose support I have yet to earn - I may not have won your vote tonight, but I hear your voices, I need your help, and I will be your president too.
AMERICA IN THE WORLD
And to all those watching tonight from beyond our shores, from parliaments and palaces to those who are huddled around radios in the forgotten corners of the world - our stories are singular, but our destiny is shared, and a new dawn of American leadership is at hand.

To those who would tear the world down - we will defeat you. To those who seek peace and security - we support you.

And to all those who have wondered if America's beacon still burns as bright - tonight we proved once more that the true strength of our nation comes not from the might of our arms or the scale of our wealth, but from the enduring power of our ideals: democracy, liberty, opportunity and unyielding hope.

For that is the true genius of America - that America can change. Our union can be perfected. And what we have already achieved gives us hope for what we can and must achieve tomorrow.

A HISTORY OF STRUGGLE
This election had many firsts and many stories that will be told for generations. But one that's on my mind tonight is about a woman who cast her ballot in Atlanta. She's a lot like the millions of others who stood in line to make their voice heard in this election except for one thing - Ann Nixon Cooper is 106 years old.

She was born just a generation past slavery; a time when there were no cars on the road or planes in the sky; when someone like her couldn't vote for two reasons - because she was a woman and because of the colour of her skin.

And tonight, I think about all that she's seen throughout her century in America - the heartache and the hope; the struggle and the progress; the times we were told that we can't, and the people who pressed on with that American creed: Yes, we can.

At a time when women's voices were silenced and their hopes dismissed, she lived to see them stand up and speak out and reach for the ballot. Yes, we can.

When there was despair in the dust bowl and depression across the land, she saw a nation conquer fear itself with a New Deal, new jobs and a new sense of common purpose. Yes, we can.

When the bombs fell on our harbour and tyranny threatened the world, she was there to witness a generation rise to greatness and a democracy was saved. Yes, we can.

She was there for the buses in Montgomery, the hoses in Birmingham, a bridge in Selma, and a preacher from Atlanta who told a people that "we shall overcome". Yes, we can.

A man touched down on the Moon, a wall came down in Berlin, a world was connected by our own science and imagination. And this year, in this election, she touched her finger to a screen, and cast her vote, because after 106 years in America, through the best of times and the darkest of hours, she knows how America can change. Yes, we can.
THIS IS OUR MOMENT
America, we have come so far. We have seen so much. But there is so much more to do. So tonight, let us ask ourselves - if our children should live to see the next century; if my daughters should be so lucky to live as long as Ann Nixon Cooper, what change will they see? What progress will we have made?

This is our chance to answer that call. This is our moment.

This is our time - to put our people back to work and open doors of opportunity for our kids; to restore prosperity and promote the cause of peace; to reclaim the American dream and reaffirm that fundamental truth - that out of many, we are one; that while we breathe, we hope, and where we are met with cynicism and doubt, and those who tell us that we can't, we will respond with that timeless creed that sums up the spirit of a people: yes, we can.

Thank you, God bless you, and may God bless the United States of America.

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2008-08-14T11:59:00.000-07:00

Earning free vacation

2008-08-13T11:25:00.000-07:00

See how easy you could travel and earn

2008-08-13T11:21:00.000-07:00

Sure methods to market your website,and get loads of traffic

2008-08-02T05:09:00.000-07:00

1. Write and submit articles to the article directories.

2. Leave comments on other people blogs with a backlink to your site.

3. Answer people questions on www.answers.yahoo.com.

4. Post in forums and have a link to your site in your signature.

5. Write a press release and submit it to www.PRWeb.com.

6. Advertise your website in the appropriate category on www.CraigsList.com.

7. Give an unbiased testimonial on a product/service that you have used in exchange for a backlink to your site.

8. Start a blog and submit it to the 100â€™s of free blog directories.

9. Manually submit your website to the major search engines.

10. Optimize each page of your website for a particular keyword or search phrase.

11. Add a link in your email signature to your website. It a free and easy way to get a little more traffic.

12. Make a custom 404 error page for your website redirecting people to your home page.

13. Use PPC search engine advertising.

14. Add a bookmark this site link to your webpages.

15. Have a tell-a-friend form on your site.

16. Send articles to ezine publishers that includes a link to your website.

17. Hold a crazy content and make it go viral.

18. Give away a freebie (ebook, report, e-course) to keep people coming back to your site.

19. Add an RSS feed to your blog.

20. Submit your site to any related niche directories on the net.

21. Participate in a banner or link exchange program.

22. Create a software program and give it away for free.

23. Purchase the misspellings or variations of your domain name, or those of your competitors.

24. Buy a domain name related to your niche that is already receiving traffic and forward it to your site.

25. Pass out business cards with your domain on them everywhere you go.

26. Start and affiliate program and let your affiliates send you visitors.

27. Start a page on social bookmarking sites such as www.MySpace.com.

28. Submit a viral video to www.YouTube.com

29. Conduct and publish surveys to your website.

30. Find joint venture partners that will send you traffic.

31. Start your own newsletter or ezine.

32. Use a autoresponder or email campaign to keep people coming back to your site.

33. Purchase ads on other sites.

34. Send a free copy of your product to other site owners in exchange for a product review.

35. Sell or place classified ads on www.eBay.com with a link to your site.

36. Post free classified ads on any of the sites that allow them with a link to your site.

37. Exchange reciprocal links with other related websites.

38. Network with other people at seminars or other live events.

39. Purchase advertising in popular newsletters or ezines.

40. Advertise on other product thank you pages.

41. Create a free ebook and list in on the free ebook sites.

42. Buy and use a memorable domain name.

43. Do something controversial.

44. Create an Amazon profile and submit reviews for books and other products that you have read.

45. Start a lens on www.Squidoo.com.

46. Use a traffic exchange (low quality traffic, but can sometimes be worthwhile).

47. Get referrals form similar but non-competing sites.

48. Create and sell a product with resell or giveaway rights and include a link to your site in it o others pass it around for you.

49. Email your list. If you dont have one, get one.

50. Buy a pair of sandals; get your website engraved on the bottom and walk on the beach, stomp in the mud or play in the snow.

1. Advertising For FREE
Where To Advertise

• Forums (most effective form of free adverts)

Ask a question, offer articles, answer questions
Always use your signature to advertise
• Groups (Yahoo, Google and MSN Groups)

• Herculist – Join for Free and email 700 random members

• FreeAdvertisingForum – Post as much as you want. Have more than 96,000 members.

• Free Advertising Blog – Join for free and post ads every seven days

• Use traffic exchanges:

Enter your affiliate link and it will be rotated in rotation.
Examples are: InstantBuzz, TrafficSwarm
• Create Free Webpages and post your ads/links

Blogger.com
FreeWebs
DotEasy
• Use List building Networks

Opportunity.com, Your Lucky List, ListDotCom, 241Leads.com

2. Paid Adverts
Where To Advertise?

• Ezines – Fastest and easiest way to get traffic

Examples: EzineAd.net, CashFromHome, AdsMarket
Type of Ads: Classified, Sponsor, Solo,
Contact advertisers, Ezines publishers
• Post Classified Ads online:

Yahoo Classified
Internet Based Moms
Cash From Home
US Free Ads
• Pay-Per-Click Search Engines (Google, MSN, etc.

Google Adwords - How It Works

You write little ads to display on search engines when people search using particular bidded keywords
If bid is high enough, it will appear on the first page
If surfers click on ad, it will take them to your sales page and Google will charge you the amount you bidded.
You only pay when somebody clicks your ad.
Bids start from $0.01 and one-time deposit of $5
How to Start:

Prepare your ad
Search for keywords pertaining to the ad you want to place
Log on to www.adwords.google.com and submit your ads together with the corresponding keywords
Use Credit or Debit card to pay for the ads
Monitor your ad.

Thanks and God bless,To our success

2008-08-02T03:08:00.001-07:00

Custom Search

2008-08-02T03:05:00.001-07:00

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2008-07-12T05:28:00.000-07:00

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2008-05-24T09:57:00.001-07:00

3 Bulls of April: Inspirational story of Kalu, Dangote and Adenuga

2008-05-13T02:37:00.000-07:00

3 Bulls of April: Inspirational story of Kalu, Dangote and Adenuga
By Mike Awoyinfa and Dimgba Igwe
Saturday, April 19, 2008

In front of the Mike Adenuga Towers in Lagos is the grotesque, larger-than-life statue of a bull cast in solid iron. It is more than a beautiful work of art adorning a majestically imposing skyscraper.

The mighty edifice and the bull are twin testimonies to the tenacity and the indomitable spirit of one of the richest men, not just in Nigeria, but the whole world. His name might not be mentioned in the Forbes’ list of world’s richest men, but everybody knows how deep Mike Adenuga’s pocket is. And how quiet he wants to keep it.

When it comes to money, enterprise and audacity of vision, he is in good company with Alhaji Aliko Dangote, the Nigerian foremost entrepreneur who was recently listed among the world’s richest men by Forbes magazine. He is also in the good company for another reason with Dr. Orji Uzor Kalu, the former governor of Abia State.
Now, what the three men of money have in common is the fact that they were all born in April under the Taurus zodiac sign of the bull. Otunba Mike Adenuga will be 55 on April 29. Aliko Dangote was 51 on April 10 and Dr. Orji Kalu would be 48 on April 21.

The three great men are held together by another umbilical cord: business. The three started out in life as commodity traders and ended up billionaires who have moved on to the zenith of different corporate endeavors…manufacturing, communication, banking, shipping, oil, real estate and other forms of businesses.

They are however not only joined together by zodiac signs and business, the three men are also inevitably friends…friends of a type. Whereas Kalu is a friend to both Adenuga and Dangote, the two corporate giants, Dangote and Adenuga maintain merely cordial acquaintance. While Adenuga is something of a recluse, preferring his own company most of the time or company of those very close to him, Dangote is more accessible and casual. Between the three bulls, it is Kalu the tycoon cum politician who is a bridge.

Kalu explains the level of friendship: “We have been friends from a long time. I became Aliko’s friend right in the early ‘80s when I was a student at the University of Maiduguri. With Mike, our friendship started when he was living close to me on 6A Adeleke Adedoyin Street in Victoria Island, Lagos. This is where all of us came to become friends. Dangote and Mike were not close, but I was close to both of them. I was a kind of bridge between two of them.”

The trio were commodity traders, involved in the importation of assorted goods—sugar, rice, tomato puree and any fast-moving product in demand. At that point, Dangote was the leader of the trio who had a mafia-like stranglehold on the commodity market in the Nigeria of that era and pushed out competition.
“Aliko was the leader,” Kalu explains, “but you cannot dominate without supporters. Basically, we fine-tuned a strategy where we were selling our commodities against wholesale traders who wanted to push us out of the market. There wasn’t a mafia, as such. It was just price competition which we used in sending away newcomers into the business.”

Their strategy for fighting competition was to import in volume and thereby bring down the price. For example, “Dangote would go and bring in 25,000 metric ton shipload of sugar. Somebody else (Kalu?) would bring 12,000 metric tons. The price and freight of those commodities cannot be the same. Many people don’t understand it that way. People would bring sugar in containers to come and compete with us who were bringing the commodity in vessels. It could never be the same. As an additional advantage, we were borrowing in offshore banks where interest rate was like 3 or 4 percent. No Nigerian bank would have given us that credit facility.

The people we bought the goods from served as our guarantors in those mega banks outside Nigeria. Our competitors were borrowing from Nigerian banks where the exchange rate was higher. All this impacted on how cheaply we brought in the product.”
Before we move on with our story, let’s delve once more into the aspect of horoscope to ask: What does it mean to be born in April? And what does being born under the sign of a bull have to do with success in life and in business?

“Bulls are very ambitious people,” explains Kalu, who apparently believes that the zodiac sign exerts some kind of influence on people’s lives and destinies. “I can tell you that anything anybody who is Taurus touches turns into gold. Whatever they set their minds to do always becomes successful. In fact, it is said that in the mid-eighties, the turnover of each of the big commodity traders were as high and at a point higher than the turnovers of the leading manufacturing companies in the country. At a point that the UAC was considered the biggest conglomerate in the country, Dangote’s turnover as a commodity trader was far higher. Kalu’s Slok Nigeria, then a mainly multi-commodity trading company, at a point in the 80s became the biggest customer/depositor in the defunct Allied Bank which then rank among the big banks. Then, the bank was managed by Alhaji Murtar Bello.

Says Kalu: “In those days, we were proud to be called traders! We used to laugh when we see the annual turnovers of some big companies because we were doing bigger turnovers.”
Inevitably, the three bulls made their first major breaks as traders. Like Kalu and Dangote, Adenuga got into various commodities like tomatoe puree, wine, rice, textiles (lace materials) car stereos and virtually anything sellable.

Kalu explains: “Aliko made his money in commodities and he has not left commodities. His various manufacturing companies are still producing many of those things he was shipping into the country as a commodity trader. Adenuga started out with commodities and then went into oil and banking before coming into communications. Today, Adenuga has made his money in communications and he is not going to leave communications. Globacom is going to become one of the largest telecoms companies in the next two years. Aliko’s cement factory will become one of the largest in the world. So you see, those born under the Taurus zodiac sign always have their eyes on top.”

Among the “Three Bulls of April” as we would call them in this piece, Adenuga is the only one who had adopted the bull as his totem and as a brand identity. Admirers call him the Bull for his spirit of persistence, for his rambunctious energy and for his never-say-die mentality. His complimentary cards are adorned with the golden image of the bull. The letters he writes carry the insignia of a bull. The sign on the door of his office has the gold mark of the bull. And he lives up to the image of a bull to the letter in his aggressiveness and his can-do attitude to business. He is like the Daniel Amokachie, the aggressive, goal-getting soccer star formerly of the Super Eagles and Everton, popularly called, “The Bull.” But Adenuga has no comparison. He is simply a man in his own world, a dreamer who dreams the impossible and makes it possible, a bull who would rampage through the wall, if he has to do that to attain a goal.

Dr. Rafiu Ladipo, a close associate and Mike Adenuga’s clearing agents since his early days as a trader in commodities says of him: “He takes risks and he is ready to stick it to the end. He never gives up. Is there anything he touches that doesn’t turn into gold? He is such a determined person. He is always charging like a bull. When he wakes up in the morning, he thinks about his business and nothing but his business. He is not a socialite. You can never catch him attending parties. He works Saturday, Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday…He goes on and on like that facing his business.”

Alhaji Aliko Dangote for religious reason might not adopt the bull or any statue as his totem, but he has the bullish instinct of Adenuga when it comes to achieving business success. Like Adenuga, Dangote’s credo is hard work and hard work and tenacity.
He summed up his credo in an interview with us: “I believe in hard work. Hard work is the key to success in life. Once you are ready to work and you are consistent, you would make money. The other point is that people are making a lot of mistakes.

Two things don’t go together. Enjoyment and money-making. These things don’t work together. You must choose one. And follow that one aggressively. You must reach a point before you start that enjoyment. These two things don’t go together at all. For anybody who wants to enjoy himself too much: going to parties, buying this one, buying that one, impressing the society people—let me not say girls—and you want to also work hard and make money, they don’t work together. You make sure you give up one and concentrate on one.”

On his part, Kalu, has the same doggedness in his approach to achieving a set goal. If he wants something, he is very persistent about it, until he gets it. For him, the word impossible doesn’t exist. For him, everything is doable, everything is achievable, if you put your mind to it and you work hard at it. The problem with Kalu is that many don’t take him seriously when he expresses his determination to do something. It is only when he has accomplished his mission that people begin to look at him with shock, surprise and envy, depending on whether you are a friend or foe.

For example, when Kalu decided to partially quit business and make a foray into the arena of politics to contest as a governor, many thought it was just a joke. But he surprised many by winning an election to be the governor of Abia State, twice.
The story of Orji Kalu is the story of a man who would probably have been at par business-wise and money-wise with his two fabulously rich friends, Dangote and Adenuga, if he had not allowed himself to be lured into politics. Kalu often tells his close associates that going into politics has made him a poorer businessman, compared to what he would have been and the wealth he would have made or created, if he had not gone into the topsy-turvy world of politics.

It was not as if he was not warned against going into the murky waters of politics. Kalu’s father warned him. And his own wife, Dr. Ifeoma Kalu warned him. In his political biography, ORJI KALU: Leadership Lessons From a Master Strategist, published in 2001, Kalu confessed in page 100: “My wife never liked my going into politics till today. My first major battle was with my wife and my father too. My wife convinced him that politics was a very dangerous adventure. She didn’t want the military to come tomorrow and start confiscating our property which we acquired long before we became governor.

Like our personal residence in Victoria Island Lagos which we bought in 1990, or our office block in Apapa which we acquired in 1989. Or our other properties in Lagos and Abuja. Somebody could come tomorrow and say we used government money to acquire them.” Her words turned out prophetic with the interim forfeiture order obtained by the EFCC which basically purports to take over everything Kalu ever owned as contained in his assets declaration forms since 1999 when he came into office as a governor.

Even Dangote who believed that a businessman’s involvement in politics should not go beyond that of the role of a quiet kingmaker, also warned him to concentrate on business rather than dabble into politics. Kalu recalls Dangote’s warning: “I remember Aliko Dangote telling me not to go. He said we had better stay where we were. But I said no, I will try, because it is a call for service and that we should be able to give service to our people, instead of staying behind the door. Somebody like Dangote has dealt with every government in this country. And the same thing goes for Adenuga. So you can see that they have no interest in politics at all. I don’t know what pushed me into having so much interest in politics.”

As for Adenua, politics and business simply do not mix well. A good businessman, in Adenuga’s view, should simply stay out of politics and mind his business. But the trio, however, believe in contributing money to favoured political candidates, but to do so as quietly as possible. Over the years, Kalu had perfected this art in various countries, being a heavy donor to one of the parties in US, ANC in South Africa, parties in Ghana and some other West African countries. But such donations are by no means simply altruistic; there were always underlying business motivations, but whether they are fulfilled or not is another story.

For Kalu, however, politics has enriched him mentally, morally and intellectually. Politics has made him a complete man who has learnt a lot from the corridors of power about the intricacies of leading and governing people and given him a deeper grasp of the riddles of human beings.
Like the stories of most great men, the story of the Three Bulls of April originates from humble beginnings. Take the case of Kalu who was rusticated as a student at the University of Maiduguri and had to ply the streets of Maiduguri selling palm oil and then moving on to furniture business before he hit big time when he moved to Lagos. Or take the case of Mike Adenuga who once worked in restaurants and drove gypsy taxis (what is called kabu-kabu in Lagos) on the streets of New York to make a living. And on his part, Dangote spent his childhood as an orphan brought up by his grandparents who gave him the initial capital to go into trading.

Talking about his humble beginnings and how he started business, Dangote told us: “No business is too small to do. As they say, Rome was not built in a day. For me, I started small as a trader in cement. Then I left cement around 1978. Because there was this armada and cement was very difficult to get at that time. I had my own money which my grandfather gave me free, but then he gave me also an additional loan of 500,000 naira which was big money in those days. With 500,000 naira in those days, you could buy yourself ten Mercedes Benz cars. Mercedes then was 5,000 naira. I am talking about Nigeria in the year 1978. Volkswagen Beetle was sold for 900 to 1,000 naira. It was a substantial amount of money then. It was a loan that I was supposed to pay whenever I was okay—probably after three years or four years. But I paid the money within six months.”

Every businessman has a turning point or series of turning points. For Mike Adenuga, the earliest turning point of his business life was when he came home to Nigeria after his studies in America and went into the importation of removable car stereos which was an innovation in the era of oil boom, when Nigerian workers were awash with the financial windfall called “Udoji Award.” People were buying cars but they were losing their car stereo to thieves. Adenuga saw in this a window of opportunity and starting bringing into Nigeria removable car stereos to solve the problem of car stereo thieves. All you did after parking your car was to remove the stereo, so that there would be nothing to attract the thieves and tempt them into breaking into your car.

Another turning point for Mike Adenuga who started business as a “Jack of all trades” was when in the course of a flight from New York to Lagos, he sat fortuitously in the business class next to a manufacturer of lace materials in Austria. Adenuga tells his story in our book, Nigeria’s Marketing Memoirs: “I went on a trip to New York and when I was returning, I missed my flight on British Airways.

So I had to fly Swiss Air and luckily I sat next to a man who owned one of the biggest lace manufacturing factories in Austria. We were talking and he got me interested in importing laces. I sold laces for a while. After that I started importing tomato, vegetable oil, wine and all sorts of things. That was how I started. In those days, for you to really survive, you had to be a Jack of all trades.”
The Jack-of-all-trades mentality has dogged Mike Adenuga subsequently such that today, he is into everything. From banking to oil, to real estate, to GSM, Adenuga dominates everything he surveys. He used to be as faceless as the Roman millionaire Abramovich who wasn’t known until he bought the Premiership club Chelsea.

Such was the mystique then of Adenuga that his photograph could hardly be found or used in the media. But today, all has changed. His incursion into telecommunication business via the massively popular brand Globacom which introduced per second billing into the Nigerian GSM market, has given him so much exposure and so much popularity.
His daughter Bella Adenuga admits this fact in our forthcoming book, In Search of Mike Adenuga. “My dad has always been a kind of quiet person,” says Bella. “It was Globacom that shot him into the limelight.”

For Dangote, the turning point, by his own admission, was when he moved from being a trader of commodities into a manufacturer of the goods he used to import, namely salt, sugar, pasta and cement. He told us in one of the series of interviews with him: “The biggest move where our organization moved at a supersonic speed was when we moved from trading to manufacturing. We thought trading would give the most money. But honestly, trading doesn’t give money. There is more money in manufacturing. When many people understand, I am sure they would try and move into manufacturing. There is more money in there, but industry is risky.

“When we went into manufacturing, we started with salt. We went into building eleven factories at the same time. We had a lot of cash. We didn’t have any teething problem, because we went into goods that we were already importing and trading on. We didn’t really create something new. We were importing pasta, so we produced pasta.
“For us, it was just to convince the consumers or the Nigerian public that the one we are producing here is as good as the one we were importing. And also to hide under that name Dangote, because it is a very good brand. That is why whatever we sell today under the brand, it sells very well. We were importing sugar, so we decided to manufacture sugar. That is what we did.”
For Kalu, the turning point of his business life was going into politics. With a hint of laments, Kalu says, “ They have left me behind, but they have not left me totally.”

He continues; “I am still very strong. What happened is that when we were entering government, I was the only governor who came into power with (the ownership of) two banks in terms of majority shares. I lost the two banks because of Obasanjo. I was also the only governor with oil bloc and I lost that too because of Obasanjo. I was a governor who came into office with crude oil contracts. I had been lifting crude oil for years and I lost it all to Obasanjo. I was the only governor who came into office with the ownership of supply boats which were chartered by oil companies. He cancelled everything. The only shipping contracts he could not cancel were the ones that involved multinationals like Exxon Mobil.

“Such was Obasanjo’s wickedness towards me that if he saw peppermint and he was told the peppermint was owned by Orji Kalu, he would ban it the following day. The ban on imported fruit juice was all because of me. He was told that we are major importers of fruit juices! But we give glory to God, because I am not worse off. Our shipping company is the largest indigenous company in Nigeria and we are planning as from next year to commission the building of the largest Platform Supply Vessel (PSV) in the U.S. which no Nigerian company has till date. Nigerian companies in the vessel business will be seeing something different. With that vessel, the cabotage law will favour Nigeria. Now the cabotage law is for the foreign companies.”

IBB factor
All the Three Bulls of April have what can be called the “IBB factor” working to their advantage. By that is meant that General Ibrahim Babingida who was a common friend of the three, helped them tremendously in his tenure as the military President of Nigeria. None of them can forget the benevolence of Babangida who opened the door for them to prosper in business. Through Babangida’s liberal policy, some or all of the three were able to obtain licences to operate banks and to have oil blocs. For Kalu and Adenuga, getting oil lifting rights from Babangida’s regime was their major turning point in business. Mike Adenuga had his Devcom Bank and Equitorial Trust Bank during Babangida’s era. Both Kalu and Adenuga who were especially close to IBB, were involved in importing arms and ammunition for the military out of which they made a lot of money.

Explaining the relationship between Babangida and two of the April Bulls, particularly Mike Adenuga, and how he came into the business of importing arms for the military, General David Jemibewon says: “Babangida himself likes young people who are enterprising. So when you have the chemistry of two people working well, then they get on well. Generally, Mike has many friends in the military. And I also want to believe he also has many friends in the press and outside the military. If you are my friend and I am a friend to A and B, and each time you come to see me as my friend, you also see A and B with me, the chances are that, with time you are likely to have some good rapport with A and B, arising from the relationship you have with me. So if you look deeply, Mike is a good friend of many of us, although at different levels or categories.

“As a friend, I could talk to whoever, in the military that I have a friend who is interested in doing this and that, I would appreciate it, if you can assist him. And in any case the military itself has no machinery to go directly to the manufacturer to purchase things like ammunition or whatever. It has to be somebody. And it doesn’t matter which way you go, they would say you favoured one person or the other. But it has to be done by somebody.”
Ibrahim Babangida himself admitted in an interview with us: “It doesn’t matter if, through me, I peddle some influence for my friends to get a job.”

Babangida sees Adenuga as one of the friends who had stood by him, even when he was out of office. “When I left office, a few of my friends honestly stood by me and I remain eternally grateful to them. Mike is one of them. Another man who doesn’t want his name mentioned any time I speak on this issue is one of them. What I like about them is this: they appreciate whatever little effort you did for them and so, they don’t abandon you. Some people will tell you, ‘ah, when I was in the office, a lot of people used to come to me, now I left office, you don’t find anybody.’ This is the Nigerian factor for you. But these characters remain close and I honestly remain grateful.”

Obasanjo factor
If Babangida played a role in the life of the trio, so did the erstwhile Nigerian President Obasanjo—for the right and the wrong reasons. Orji Kalu’s lamentation about Obasanjo’s “wickedness” in crippling his businesses has made headlines, particularly the banning of his SLOK Airlines from operating in Nigeria. In the case of Adenuga, Obasanjo made him go through Golgotha, canceling his GSM licence, making him to lose $20 million and employing all kinds of frustrations to deny him of licence, but eventually, sanity prevailed and he was rewarded with a basket of licences.

Reflecting on his ordeal, Adenuga told Newswatch magazine: “I believe that there is more to what happened. As the only indigenous player, 100 percent wholly indigenous, and we are talking of the most sensitive and biggest business today, if five of us bidded and at the end of the day, three of us won and the only one that is 100 percent indigenous lost its licence, then something must be wrong somewhere…I think there were some forces behind it but I think it ended well.”

Many a times, Adenuga would go to Aso Rock to beg Obasanjo or send emissaries, but the old man would not budge. Stories have it that Adenuga would prostrate for Obasanjo as a Yoruba and he would simply walk out on him. “I would not give you my license!” the then emperor of Aso Rock would shout and curse. He simply wouldn’t give Adenuga his licence. And he would tell him so, straight to his face. But in all this, Adenuga did not lose his sense of optimism and faith that he would regain his licence. People who know Adenuga, describe him as the eternal optimist who never loses hope on anything, when everyone else has given up hope.

Unlike Kalu and Adenuga, Dangote has a warmer story to tell about his relationship with Obasanjo.
“Former President Obasanjo and I became closer because his government is purely for people who would add value to the economy,” he says. “If I wasn’t adding value to the economy, I can assure you that I wouldn’t be as friendly as I am with Obasanjo. Eighty-five percent of my relationship with Obasanjo has to do with the economy of the country. Even when we sit down, eight-five percent of the time is spent discussing the economy. How do we move the economy forward?
“And I think I have to be really grateful. Let me share my experience on cement, for example. But for Obasanjo’s encouragement and push, there is no way Obajana (Cement Factory) would have been possible at all. It was his push that made the difference.”

Connections
All the three bulls would agree that having connections is the key to business success in Nigeria, particularly having connections in the government of the day. Dangote and Adenuga would tell you that to succeed as a businessman, you don’t need to antagonize the government of the day.
“Every single government that comes in, we would be friendly with them, because we are government-friendly,” says Dangote. “That is No.1. And I believe each and every company is government-friendly. Let Jim Ovia go and be the enemy of government and you would see where Zenith Bank would go. Or UBA. Or First Bank. Even as conservative as First Bank, let them say they don’t have anything to do with government and that they are on their own. Let them be coming out to say things against the government. And they would reap the consequence.”

Mother
Between Kalu and Adenuga, you will find a strong maternal influence. Everybody who knows the Mike Adenuga’s story, tells about a powerful mum who exerted influence on her son. It was the mother that gave him the first seed to start his business, shortly after returning home from America where he went to study. Niyi Adewunmi, Adenuga’s close aide would tell you that in the event of any conflict with his boss, once Adenua’s mother’s name was invoked, the matter would end there. Mike dared not go against his mother. The only time he disobeyed her was when rather than sell off his oil licence, he went ahead to make a foray into oil exploration when the mother said seeking oil was like playing kalokalo (gambling) and that he was bound to lose. In the end he proved the mother wrong by striking oil at a time oil exploration was the exclusive preserve of expatriates. Striking oil was another turning point in the life of Mike Adenuga.

In the case of Kalu, such was the overpowering influence of the mum that many believed she was the power behind his throne in his days as governor. But Kalu disagrees he was ever tied to his mother’s apron spring. He told us: “What people think is not the true representation of things, but my mother is my mother. She never teleguided me. What people don’t understand is that my mother had been in politics long before me. Do you know that when I was a governor, for six months, I may never see her? The present governor who was my Chief of Staff can testify to that.”

Perhaps, that is the case. What, however, is undeniable is the strong bond between Kalu and his mother. During military regime when Kalu was detained for months on Abacha’s orders, ostensibly because some arrested coup plotters were alleged to be his close friends in the military, Kalu’s mother moved into detention camp to stay with her son. Some medical personnel attending to Kalu were amazed at the woman’s tenacity.

“She would spread her cloth on the ground and sleep while Kalu slept on the hospital bed and she did that throughout his stay in the military hospital. Such maternal tenacity is uncommon.”
The story of the Three Bulls can run on and on, into a whole book. But this is not the time for such a book. They all run a jet-style life, preferring to fly in their private jets. The only person you will find at the local airport occasionally flying in commercial flight is Dangote. You will not catch Kalu or Adenuga in a commercial flight.

Bella Adenuga told us that his father had no choice than to fly a private jet, because of his penchant for missing flights. She said: “My dad is very busy. Usually when he attempts to fly commercial, he misses the flight about three times before he makes the flight. So the best means for him is to fly on his private jet.”

The Saturday Sun recently reported the story of Dangote’s close-shave with death, when his private jet developed engine problems in the skies of Angola.
While Dangote and Adenuga had their private jets, Kalu has none. His mother forbad him buying a private jet when was determined to acquire one about 14 years ago. She felt something untoward would happen to him if he was flying a private jet. Her hunch was so strong that Kalu gave in on one hand and defied her on the other. For those 14 years, Kalu had never flown commercial plane locally. He travels in a chartered plane all over the country.

India
Between Adenuga and Dangote, there is an affinity for India. When it comes to hiring manpower, Adenuga believes in bringing in Indians to manage his businesses. His Chief Operating Officer (COO) for Globacom is an Indian. So are his marketing strategists and his telecommunication technicians. And when asked about his business role model, Dangote similarly pointed to India, saying: “I like what some Indian companies are doing. Companies like Reliance Group and the Tatas. I think we have something in common with the Reliance Group. They think big and they do big things. For example, they decided to go into supermarkets and they are sinking $5billion into supermarkets.

They have built a refinery of 660,000 barrels a day. It is a single refinery but the biggest in the world. And they are doubling the refinery. These are the kind of things that we are talking about. Ten years ago, they were not really that big. And in the ’70s, the person who really started the business, their father, Ambani, was a petrol attendant. He was filling people with petrol in their cars when they visited the station. He used to live inside a small apartment with his family. And he dreamt of building a refinery. He died four years ago, but he fulfilled his dream. My dream should be translated faster than his own. But the only thing is that he is playing in a bigger market.”

With his Globacom, Adenuga also has a vision of playing in a bigger market. Two men with common vision, but you would think Dangote and Adenuga should be close friends who, like birds of the same feathers, fly together. But to the contrary, Dangote would tell you: “I haven’t seen Mike for a very long time. I don’t have his number. I don’t know where to reach him. Even if you put a gun on my head and you ask me to lead you to Adenuga, I will never be able to. He is just nowhere to be found. Mike is a mystery to me.”

The whole story of Three Bulls in itself sounds like some kind of mystery! It is a story of a new generation of Nigerians with faith in Nigeria, with a can-do spirit and an indomitable zeal to stay in Nigeria and succeed right here in Nigeria. In the words of Dangote: “Yes, I believe in this country. I believe there is always going to be Nigeria. My faith and belief in this country is unshakeable. We have to live together in peace and not in pieces. Why are we important in the world today? It is because of our population. Population and our oil. It is not because the world loves the name Nigeria.

No. When was the last time you heard about Kuwait or Brunei? The importance of Nigeria is the market. “It is a place that I believe has the best opportunities in the world. It might sound crazy, but yes, the opportunities in Nigeria are extremely good. People can make good money here in Nigeria. I know there are challenges, but if you are not a good manager, then you would look for areas where there are no challenges. Like now, you would say there is power in Switzerland, everything is there for you. No armed robbers. Nothing. But how much profit can you make in Switzer.

UBA repositions itself for market leadership

2008-05-13T02:32:00.000-07:00

UBA repositions itself for market leadership
• Appoints 2 Deputy Managing Directors, 3 New Executive Directors

The Board of Directors of United Bank for Africa Plc, West Africa’s largest financial services group with assets in excess of US$14 billion, has approved a major repositioning exercise to fully enable the Bank realise the next phase of its strategic growth and global expansion.

The exercise followed a 3-yearly strategic revalidation, carried out by the Bank, working with McKinsey, the global management consulting firm, on its objective of becoming the leading financial services group in Africa by 2010. The strategic repositioning identified thee key outputs: a new operating structure; the appointment of two Deputy Managing Directors and 3 new Executive Directors; as well as the realignment of the portfolios of existing senior management - all aimed at ensuring exceptional service to the bank’s over six million customers.

Specifically the Group has now been structured into six Strategic Business Groups and three Strategic Support groups. All nine Strategic groups report to the GMD/CEO.

The six Strategic Business Groups have responsibility for customer interface and business development and include:
• UBA Plc Nigeria-South,
• UBA Plc Nigeria-North,
• UBA Capital,
• UBA International,
• UBA Retail Financial Services and
• UBA Products & Segment Banking

Nigeria, currently the Bank’s largest market, has been divided into the North and South clusters, each to be led by a Deputy Managing Director. UBA Nigeria-North will provide banking services to customers within Northern Nigeria and deepen the Bank’s penetration in this region. UBA Nigeria-South shall provide similar services within the Southern region of Nigeria.

UBA Capital will provide investment banking, asset management, wealth management and merchant banking services with a scope of operations that covers Nigeria, the African continent and global financial centres where UBA Plc has presence. It is made up of nine subsidiary companies that are market leaders in different sub sectors of the Nigerian Capital Market.

UBA International has been created to spearhead the Bank’s global expansion plans and continue to deepen the Group’s market penetration of the African continent and the global banking arena.

UBA Retail Financial Services is a new and unique service platform established to provide a wide range of financial services targeting non-bank customers across Africa, through non-branch channels such as direct sales agents, telemarketing, internet, consumer outlets, dealers, microfinance banks, etc.

UBA Global Products & Segment Banking is the directorate charged with the responsibility of actively developing market opportunities by designing and offering products, managing segments and service delivery channels, all aimed at serving the current and future needs of the Group’s customers.

The three Strategic Support Functions have responsibility for Group Shared Services that will enable the group exploit the benefits of scale and imbibe more rigorous discipline across business processes. This is designed to enable the delivery of superior operational efficiency, governance standards, controls and superlative customer service. The functions are:

The Group Operations Office, headed by the Group Chief Operating Officer (GCOO), will ensure efficient delivery of business infrastructure, operational controls and business oversight across UBA Group Shared Services, to improve overall efficiency and performance in line with group strategy.

Group Chief Finance Office (GCFO) responsible for maintaining and managing systems and processes that promote the financial efficiency and financial integrity of the Group’s operations, including management information system, performance management, financial and regulatory reporting, financial control and cost management, corporate productivity enhancement, budgeting and associated imperatives.

Group Chief Risk Office (GCRO) will design and manage systems and processes that continuously monitor risk and deliver regulatory compliance in all jurisdictions where UBA operates ensuring that risk is proactively identified and effectively managed across UBA Group.

“We are optimizing the potential that exists in our great bank and those of our subsidiary and associated companies in order to remain large yet nimble and responsive to the ever-changing needs of our customers” said Tony Elumelu, GMD/CEO UBA Plc.

One of the propelling forces behind UBA is the cohesiveness of its board and management team. To drive the implementation of the new operating structure, the Board has approved new executive appointments and the re-alignment of the existing management team thus:

Faith Tuedor-Matthews, former Regional Bank Head, Abuja has been appointed Deputy Managing Director Nigeria-North. Mrs. Tuedor-Matthews, one of Nigeria’s most respected female corporate leaders has over two decades experience in the Nigerian banking industry. Besides being an alumnus of Harvard Business School, she holds an MBA from the University of Aston, Birmingham, UK and a post-graduate Diploma in Marketing from Staffordshire University, UK.

Phillips Oduoza has been appointed Deputy Managing Director overseeing UBA Nigeria-South, which covers the bank’s core banking operations in the South, East and West regions of the country including Lagos State. The former Executive Director, Electronic & Transaction Banking brings more than 23 years of banking experience to his new role. He holds a First Class B.Sc (Civil Engineering) Degree, an MBA (Finance) from University of Lagos and is an Alumnus of the Harvard Business School’s Advanced Management Programme.

Chika Mordi formerly Executive Director, Investment & Asset Management is now the CEO of UBA Capital. In this role, he will oversee 9 subsidiaries across three continents, which provide a comprehensive range of financial services including Investment Banking, Pensions Custodian, Registrars, Trading and Advisory services. Chika is a seasoned and well-respected multi-lingual banker. Formerly Managing Director of Continental Trust Bank prior to the STB-UBA merger, Chika is currently the Chairperson of the Credit Reference Company of Nigeria. He holds graduate and post graduate degrees in Economics and had additional training at the Spanish Institute of Higher Business Studies (IESE) as well as the Harvard Business School.

Victor Osadolor, Executive Director has been appointed Group Chief Finance Officer with responsibility for managing systems and processes that will promote efficiency and financial integrity. Mr. Osadolor is a seasoned Banker and Chartered Accountant. He is an Associate Member, Institute of Chartered Accountants of Nigeria (ICAN) and Honorary Life Member of the Chartered Institute of Bankers of Nigeria (CIBN). Victor is an Alumnus of Harvard Business School co-chaired the team that midwifed the STB-UBA integration process. He serves on the Board of ATM Consortium Limited Nigeria as Vice Chairman.

Emmanuel Nnorom has been appointed to Executive Director and appointed Group Chief Operating Officer. His portfolio includes, Information Technology (IT), Operations, Corporate Services, Marketing & Communications, Customer Service, UBA Properties, Human Resources and Regulatory Affairs. Mr. Nnorom is a seasoned auditor and accountant and brings over 2 decades of experience to his new role. He is an Alumnus of the Oxford University Templeton College, a Fellow of the Institute of Chartered Accountants of Nigeria (ICAN), winning First Prize in the finals of the May 1982 ICAN examinations. He trained as an accountant with Peat Marwick Castleton Elliot & Co.

Rasheed Olaoluwa has been appointed Executive Director and CEO of UBA International, with responsibility for driving the Group’s rapid global expansion strategy. He holds a First Class degree in Civil Engineering, an Executive MBA from the Spanish Institute of Higher Business Studies (IESE) and trained at Arthur Andersen where he qualified as a Chartered Accountant. Mr. Olaoluwa has had a long banking career, playing senior roles in marketing and relationship management, treasury management, currency trading and investment banking. He was MD/CEO of the former Universal Trust Bank Plc before joining post-merger UBA Plc.

Godwin Ize-Iyamu who is an Executive Director, has been assigned the portfolio of Wholesale Banking, UBA Nigeria-South. Formerly Regional Bank Head Lagos, Godwin is a well respected banker and administrator with a rich and diversified experience in corporate and wholesale banking. The University of Central Florida Engineering graduate also studied Accounting at the University of Houston and qualified as a Certified Public Accountant in 1983, having won the “The Top Ten Award” honours in Texas State in the 1982 Examinations.

Angela Nwabuoku has been appointed Executive Director overseeing of Products and Segment Banking. Mrs. Nwabuoku has over two decades experience in the banking industry in West Africa where she has held various senior positions in some Nigerian and regional banks. She holds a B.Sc. degree from The American University, Washington DC and has been an International associate of the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants since 1985.

Ibrahim Jega, formerly Executive Director, North Bank, is now Executive Director, Public Sector & State Governments. The accomplished banker has over 25 years banking experience. He studied at the Ahmadu Bello University, Zaria, earning a B.Sc and an MBA in Business Administration. Since joining the bank in 2004, he has played a prominent role in deepening the bank’s penetration of the Northern Nigerian market.

Andre Blaauw is the newly appointed Group Risk Officer. A South African national who has over 20 years of International banking experience. Prior to joining UBA, he was Executive in charge of the Enterprise Risk management division of ABSA Bank, South Africa; a member of the Barclays Group. Andre is an Alumnus of Witwatersrand Business School, with post graduate qualifications in Accounting and Mathematics. He is a chartered financial analyst and member of the Association of Investment Management Research.

Abhinav Nehra is another key international hire. Appointed CEO of UBA Retail Financial Services, Abhinav, prior to joining UBA, was CEO for Retail & Private banking in one of the largest and oldest banks in Kuwait. He holds First Class degrees in Business Administration at both graduate and post graduate levels from Premier institutes in India. He spent 18 years with Citigroup in countries like India, Australia, Indonesia and UK, rising to the position of Chief Operating Officer (COO) for Citi Financial (India), which was the most successful consumer finance franchise for Citigroup globally. He was nominated for the prestigious GLOBAL LEADERSHIP PROGRAMME for Citigroup which entailed a nine months residency in the US.

These appointments are just a few of the strategic hires that UBA has been making in the last twelve months to drive the Group’s ambitious growth, expansion and transformation programmes. With this new operating architecture and the caliber of the management team, UBA has ensured that it continues to be at the forefront of the African economic renaissance, and that it remains clearly on course to achieve its vision of being the foremost financial services institution on the continent and Africa’s global bank.

“Following a 3-year strategic revalidation process, we have repositioned the Group for the next phase of growth and higher performance level. As always, we are guided by our long term strategy of staying very close to our customers, making their lives easier and helping them achieve their life ambitions.” Elumelu further explained.

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2008-05-07T05:24:00.000-07:00

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Newspapers and blogs: Closer than we think?

2008-04-04T03:25:00.000-07:00

Back in the mid-1850s, the English philosopher John Stuart Mill argued that a citizenry could not, would not, flourish unless it was nourished by the full spectrum of voices that exist among the people:

It is, however, obvious that law and authority have no business with restraining either [side or sides of the debate], while opinion ought, in every instance, to determine its verdict by the circumstances of the individual case, condemning every one, on whichever side of the argument he places himself, in whose mode of advocacy either want of candour, or malignity, bigotry, or intolerance of feeling manifest themselves; but not inferring these vices from the side which a person takes, though it be the contrary side of the question to our own; and giving merited honour to every one, whatever opinion he may hold, who has calmness to see and honesty to state what his opponents and their opinions really are, exaggerating nothing to their discredit, keeping nothing back which tells, or can be supposed to tell in their favour. This is the real morality of public discussion.
Well over one hundred years later, the blogosphere came into our lives, allowing us, in the words of Jerome Armstrong and Markos Moulitsas Zúniga, to "hear voices that had been shut out of the corporate media outlets."

These old "corporate media outlets," refusing to fade away, have held their ground. According to William Dietrich, a writer with the Seattle Times Sunday magazine, the sacred purpose of the newspaper reporter "is to fulfill an essential function of our democracy not just by disseminating information but also by analyzing it, detecting patterns, spotting trends, and increasing societal understanding." Indeed, bloggers may generate a more democratic Public Square, but can they facilitate a more comprehensive understanding of how political events are most likely to evolve, the Old Guard worries and wonders. In other words, Mill might not be enough.

To contribute to this Great Debate, I decided to conduct a content analysis of how blogs and newspapers covered the Iraq War during one week in late March 2007. By looking at how the two media have sourced their news stories, I hoped to offer insights into what exactly the American public "hears" from newspapers and blogs.

More specifically, my research, by examining five major newspapers and six popular political blogs, sought to answer three questions:

Which media platform uses more sources?
Which offers a more diverse range of sources?
And which types of sources are more prevalent in each platform?

Findings

Overall, the data showed that blogs included a higher number of total sources and a slightly wider range of sources.
Blogs included an average number of nine sources per blog posting, compared to an average of just six for newspapers stories.

The gap between newspapers and blogs was considerably narrower when evaluating the types of sourcing. Still, blogs were slightly more diverse in their sourcing, with four sources per posting compared to an average of three in newspaper stories.

Digging deeper, which types of sources were the two media most likely to use?

Both blogs and newspapers were likely to include traditional Washington sources, both political and intellectual.

But blogs and newspapers did diverge in several key ways. Compared to newspapers, blogs were considerably less likely than newspapers to include official Iraqi sources.

And perhaps as a tell-tale sign of what the mainstream press really thinks of the blogosphere, just two percent of newspaper stories used a blog as a source. Not surprisingly, bloggers used other bloggers as sources at almost the same frequency as they used the mainstream press.

Sourcing in Blogs

Seven in ten (69%) blog postings included a mainstream media outlet (e.g. Washington Post, AP, The New York Times) as a source and 64% used other bloggers as sources.
Political Washington was well represented. Thirty percent of all stories had a source from a Democratic politician or party strategist, 28% included one from a Republican or GOP operative, and 23% included a source from the White House.

Meanwhile, a quarter (25%) included sources from the Pentagon, a soldier fighting in Iraq, or an immediate member of a soldier's family. Ten percent of all blog postings had a source from other government officials, such as analysts from the State Department or the American embassy in Iraq. Furthermore, 16% of all postings included a government document as a source, such as a hyperlink to a PDF of a legislative bill or the complete voting results for a particular bill from the Office of the Clerk at the U.S. House of Representatives.

Considerably fewer blog postings, however, included sources from Iraqi government officials (11%), such as local police and security forces and hospital administrators, and an even smaller number offered sources from Sunni or Shiite politicians (five percent). And only two percent of all postings included a source from the Iraqi insurgency.

Five percent of posts included sources from Iraqi civilians, and eight percent had sources from U.S. civilians.

Finally, a quarter (25%) offered a source from a non-partisan, non-governmental entity, such as a think tank, polling organization, or university.

Sourcing in Newspapers

Turning to newspapers, the most frequent source was a U.S. military official or family member. Over half (53%) of all newspaper stories included a source from this cohort—more than double the percentage in blogs.
The second most common source was a Democratic one; more than three in ten stories (32%) offered a Democratic source.

A quarter (24%) included a source from the Bush Administration, and another 16% had a source from other Republican politicians or strategists.

Another 22% included a source from other government officials outside the halls of Congress, the White House or the Pentagon.

Newspapers were also likely to offer an Iraqi point of view. Thirty-one percent of all stories included sources from the Iraqi authorities. Two in ten (20%) stories included sources from either Shiite or Sunni politicians. An additional seven percent was from sources coded as insurgents.

At the non-political level, newspapers were more likely to quote an Iraqi civilian, with ten percent of all stories offering this point of view. Half that percentage (five percent) included sources from U.S. civilians who were not family members of an American solider fighting in Iraq.

Twenty-three percent used a poll, statement from a non-partisan think tank, or academic as a source.

Finally, eight percent of stories used a mainstream media outlet as a source, and just two percent included blogs.

Conclusion

Much of the current debate in journalism that centers around how sourcing is used in blogs concerns the issues of verification of information not reported in the mainstream press. But for now, this doesn't appear to be their raison d'etre. The function of blogs may be an equally important one, however, offering a more nuanced, synthesized perspective not found anywhere else on the Web.
Perhaps what's most at stake for blogs is to evaluate which voices are being synthesized. According to the data for this study, an admittedly limited one, bloggers may be missing perhaps the most important piece of the political puzzle when we acknowledge the realpolitik of Iraq.

Both the American and Iraqi people are growing increasingly weary of the American military presence in Iraq, according to public opinion polls in both countries. If there is one point Democrats and Republicans can agree on it is that Iraq's future success rests on the further strengthening of Iraq's political institutions.

Right now, it may be that the traditional press—represented by newspapers here-has picked up on this better than blogs. The data shows that roughly four times as many stories in newspapers included sources from leading Sunni and Shiite politicians as did blogs. Where blogs excelled, with more bloggers, media sources and original texts as sources, is perhaps more easily to duplicate for newspapers on their websites. What cannot be mimicked so easily is the ability to discern which way the political winds are blowing in Baghdad and Washington.

One might dismiss this conclusion as an elitist, Lippmanian one. Regardless, it begs the question of whether or not the public most benefits from a traditional journalist sensibility that, despite its flaws and declining commitment to foreign affairs, can still be found at the country's best newspapers. Perhaps all those years of having boots on the ground overseas still colors, positively, newspaper coverage.

However, one should keep in mind that only a third (34%) of all bloggers considers their blog a form of journalism, according to a study from the Pew Internet & American Life Project. So my insights may be a case of trying to fit a round peg into a square hole. Furthermore, until the mainstream press can better understand that media consumption and production are increasingly conversational, collaborative activities—where bloggers and citizens talk to each other—perhaps the best advice I can give is to take the time to read a newspaper and a blog or two.

About the Study

For this study, I counted the number of sources over seven days in late March 2007 (March 23-March 29). Only stories with the war in Iraq as the dominant story (50% or more of the story) were coded. Overall, 172 newspaper stories and blog postings--the units of analysis--were coded.
Sources did not have to be original. For example, a blog that quoted an interview from Senator John McCain that originally appeared in the Washington Post would be counted as a source, even though the actual reporting was not done by the blogger. Original sources, though in small numbers, could be found in blogs, most notably in Greg Sargent's postings on Talking Points Memo.

First, I looked at five major newspapers: Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, The New York Times, USA Today, and the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. Wire stories that appeared in newspapers were included. A total of 111 newspaper stories were coded.

Second, I conducted an analysis of three major blogs from the left and three from the right. They included: Talking Points Memo, Political Animal (the Washington Monthly blog), Daily Kos, Michelle Malkin, Powerline, and Hugh Hewitt. A total of 61 blog postings were analyzed for the research.

For blogs, a source was defined as those that were available either on the homepage posting or those on secondary pages within one mouse click from the original blog posting. Then, sources within these secondary pages were coded as well (e.g. links to other news sources, bloggers, and government documents). This methodology was employed in order to measure—as much as possible—the total available number of sources that are consumed by the typical blog reader, and not just those that appear in the original blog posting. Sources within tertiary pages (and beyond) were not coded because I felt that only a small number of blog readers would actually read this deep into a blog posting. Nevertheless, these tertiary (and beyond) pages theoretically expand the number of potential sources and should be kept in mind before forming any firm conclusions about the nature of sourcing in blogs.

The good, bad and ugly of contextual ads from Google, Yahoo

2008-04-04T03:16:00.001-07:00

Embarrassing juxtapositions have plagued contextual ads on media sites and blogs. But they can fit well with commercially focused content. Here's a deeper look at the pros and cons of AdSense and ContentMatch.

It has happened before, and it will happen again. I was reading a story on the San Jose Mercury News' Web site about federal agents arresting people for running a sex-trafficking ring out of massage parlors. And when I saw the text ads below the story served through Google AdSense, they were for day spas and massage services in the San Francisco Bay Area.
The ads are deemed relevant by the computer algorithm that might search the story for key words Embarrassing juxtapositions have plagued contextual ads on media sites and blogs. But they can fit well with commercially focused content. Here's a deeper look at the pros and cons of AdSense and ContentMatch.
and match them to the key words that these advertisers bought. But the algorithm can't quite match human judgment that might consider this to be the wrong place for legitimate spas to promote their services.

When Google launched self-service AdSense advertisements in June 2003, these types of mismatched ads proliferated -- almost to the point of being a parlor game where you find the weirdest mix of ads and content. But over time, Google AdSense and Yahoo's competing ContentMatch have improved their algorithms, have worked more closely with big publishers, and have taken feedback from readers and advertisers to improve their systems and reduce mismatches.

Even so, contextual advertisements remain a strange breed, living alongside journalistic content or blog postings as text ads and fighting for attention with rich media ads. Contextual ads have performed well for Google and Yahoo, brought in some good money for online publishers, and given the advertisers some bang for their buck. If all three parties are happy, that's nice for their business, but how much tolerance should there be for goofy pairings?

John Battelle, who is starting FM Publishing to help bloggers sell ads on their sites, sees advertising as a conversation and believes that there's only so much an algorithm can do in matching advertisers with publishers.

"I think it rings a sour note in the conversation in the publishing community [when mismatches happen]," Battelle told me. "And sour notes over time can lessen the conversation. I know that the platform guys [at Yahoo and Google] are working really hard to stop that problem, which is really difficult to do, because it's language. ... You can do a hierarchy and say if this is a news story, you show only these types of ads, but then you're missing out on what might be the right ad."

As Google improves AdSense, Yahoo is readying a similar self-service platform, which is only in limited beta currently. But Yahoo's Search Marketing division (formerly Overture) has worked with large publishers for some time and has a long history of matching ads with search key words. Here's a rundown on the good, bad and ugly of these contextual ad services -- and which content works best in matching ads and bringing in more revenues for sites.

The good

The first rule of thumb for contextual ads is the opposite of the old local TV news maxim, "If it bleeds, it leads." In the case of hard news related to war, terrorism, rapes, murders and other unpleasant current events, the best bet could be to remove contextual ads or just run more generic run-of-site ads. Of course, some site publishers have no problem with hawking commemorative Iraqi War playing cards on stories about people dying in the war.

Yahoo's ContentMatch uses various sensitivity filters for what ads are shown with content -- along with human oversight from a staff of more than 100 editorial people. Paul Volen, who is vice president of product marketing for Yahoo Search Marketing, told me that Yahoo's human oversight is what differentiates his service from Google's.

"First, we do have a dynamic proprietary algorithm which takes the theme of a page and matches advertising to it," Volen told me. "We also add a layer of editorial oversight to that. We look at a site and try to understand if there's content that's evergreen and won't change, like index pages that are generic and aren't updated every day. In those cases, we could have the editorial staff look at them and come up with the best matches. We work with the publishers pretty closely across their site to figure out how we want to attack the relevancy and matching."

Google doesn't have an editorial staff for AdSense, but does assign account managers to bigger sites for the premium level of AdSense services -- though it is only available for sites above 20 million page views per month. Gokul Rajaram, group product manager for Google AdSense, told me that there are just too many dynamic pages served for humans to watch every ad that's served up.

So what content works well with contextual ad services? Usually the more focused the content, and the more commercial it is, the better. So a blog that covers Asian travel should outperform a blog about inner-city crime. Rajaram says there are a number of factors that affect how well the ads do for publishers and advertisers -- including how fertile a topic area is for advertisers and where the ads are placed on a page.

"If the advertiser makes $100 per sale, then they're willing to pay $5 per click," he said. "If the advertiser only makes $10 then they would only be able to pay one-tenth of that. The cost-per-click depends on the vertical that the advertiser is in, as well as the competitiveness of the term that it's in. ... Finally, there's the matter of clickthrough rates, which depends on the relevance of the ads and the placement of the ads on the page. What is the mode of the users, are they in a browse mode and just reading news articles?"

For a general news site, the breaking news sections might not perform as well as lifestyle, travel, business and technology. One great example of a fertile ground for contextual ads is Weblogs Inc., the network of blogs set up by entrepreneur Jason Calacanis. Calacanis has used AdSense to help jumpstart his business as he also sells display ads on his 80-plus blogs that are very targeted into vertical categories -- from digital photography to babies and pregnancy.

For that reason, Calacanis has nothing negative to say about his experience with AdSense.

"The ads are absurdly targeted in my experience," Calacanis told me via e-mail. "People look at them like content and they don't even mind them. It's a revolution in advertising --for the first time since the Super Bowl people want the ads! It's advertising nirvana for everyone involved: advertiser, publisher, and Google. ... Text-based advertisers find out about our site because of Google AdSense and then they wind up buying display ads. So, Google is doing free marketing for us in a way. I've found no downside as a publisher -- zero."

Still, Calacanis isn't putting all his eggs in the contextual ad basket and realizes the majority of his income is from display ads sold directly to advertisers. Plus, he says Weblogs Inc. is considering using the FM Publishing network being set up by Battelle to help match advertisers with blogs using the human touch.

The bad

While automated contextual ad services take the hassle out of selling advertisements for small publishers or bloggers, they might not perform that well for medium-sized sites that aren't focused on very specific commercial niches or cover more strategic or philosophical subject mattter.

Matt McAlister is vice president and general manager of tech trade magazine InfoWorld's online operations and also runs the remains of the Industry Standard's Web site. While the latter site does get about 50,000 unique users per month, according to McAlister, the AdSense ads just don't seem to fit well or bring in much income.

"In terms of revenues, there's certainly a threshold that your site needs to reach before [AdSense] does anything for you," McAlister said. "TheStandard.com has 50,000 uniques, but [the income] is almost laughable. It's better to do sponsorship, where someone owns a section of the site. I remember examples of the stuff that came up that was either completely abstract or inappropriate. I don't think it has great value to the people who are using the site. With the site at 50,000 uniques, that should be attractive at a certain level, but I have a feeling it's not a useful way to use your ad inventory."

InfoWorld itself is owned by media conglomerate IDG, and its site uses the contextual ad services of a company called Industry Brains. When you click on an InfoWorld story, you'll see small text ads placed adjacent to the first paragraph or two of the story. They look like AdSense ads but, they're actually served and created by InfoWorld itself. McAlister says they decided to run these ads in order to help advertisers who wanted to generate leads. In many cases, he said, people tune out graphical ads or don't ever click on them -- but they're more likely to click on text ads that are relatively relevant.

"We started off by targeting them at a very granular level," McAlister said. "Our taxonomy has about 200-some terms in it, so we were targeting two or three levels down the tree. But we found that it was better to back out and only target the top level, the top 14 categories, because you're able to reach a little bit further on the number of impressions you're able to serve. The targeting at that level wasn't that effective. They might not be as relevant, but with InfoWorld you don't have to be that specific to convert ads."

But McAlister does see the value in contextual ads and clicked on various ads while planning a recent vacation using Yahoo Travel.

"In a vertical like that, where the inventory is limited to a number of partners, then that scarcity creates value," he said. "But if you're using a blanket key-words matching system against the text on a page against an infinite number of sites, I don't think that's going to have much value for the publisher or the readers."

Battelle, who also founded the Industry Standard magazine, agrees with McAlister when it comes to automated contextual ads. He reiterates the point that medium-sized publishers are often stuck in the cold with Google and Yahoo. And his experience with AdSense on the popular group blog BoingBoing was that the ads just didn't fit with the often esoteric subject matter.

"Big publishers are slowly working out human relationships with the Googles and Yahoos of the world and start to filter and create feeds [of ads] that work for them," he said. "But you can't have a guy who has 250,000 readers a month as opposed to 2.5 million who can have a conversation with the AdSenses of the world."

The problem is that a Web page with content on it -- whether a reported article or a blog rant -- isn't the same as a page that has basic search results. So the interaction between key-word triggered ads and the content is different and more subtle to work out. That's how Battelle sees FM Publishing squeezing in to serve high-traffic blogs.

"Search has proven that point with this great aggregator on one end of the conversation, where people were putting their question into a search box, and a magic list came up that appeared to be relevant," Battelle said. "But what about the places where the conversation is already happening? A blog is not where someone is putting a question into a search box, but where a community is already very real, and you need to know the mores of that community before you can enter that conversation in way where you'll be accepted."

Jennifer Slegg runs a blog covering contextual ads called JenSense. Slegg compared ad relevancy using early versions of Yahoo's self-service network and says they still have a ways to go to match up with Google AdSense. She also mentioned one other fault with the AdSense matching system -- dynamic content pages aren't checked by Google very often.

"Bloggers have a harder time with relevancy, particularly on their blog index page when they post frequently," Slegg told me via e-mail. "Because Google indexes about once per month, writing a single entry about popcorn right before the [Google] bot visits can result in popcorn ads for about a month, even if the majority of the posts are about a tech subject. Targeting on individual blog entry pages is usually very good. This is why many of the news sites running contextual ad programs do not often run ads on the pages that change frequently, such as the index page and the subsection pages, but run it on the articles themselves."

The ugly

While many of the early kinks of contextual mismatches have been worked out at big news sites, there still remains a gray area that's difficult to catch. Just spend some time digging through the local news online, and you're bound to come up with a doozy or two.

For instance, a story on LATimes.com about police spying on activists ends with ads for doing public records searches -- basically spying on people. And below an obituary for a rabbi in NYTimes.com is an ad link to humorous Yiddish garb. While publishers and the technology companies might be watching for problems, they still slip through.

I talked with one of the advertisers who was included below the Mercury News story about the massage parlor busts. Pierce Salguero is executive director of Tao Mountain, a non-profit which offers courses in Thai massage and herbal medicine. He wasn't sure why his ad came up in that case and told me that he actually used the terms "sex" and "prostitution" as negative key words in AdSense so the ad wouldn't come up in association with these search terms or content.

"[Mismatches] probably happen more often than I know about which is unfortunate, because we're not a spa," Salguero said. "We're a non-profit network of researchers who are working at the medical application and history and context of traditional medicine in Thailand."

But despite the problems, Salguero wouldn't give up using Google and Yahoo for lead generation for his programs. He says he gets 80 to 85 percent of his business through paid search and contextual ads online vs. print ads and the occasional direct mailer.

"It's definitely been worth doing no matter what snafus might have happened along the way," Salguero said.

One sign of the effectiveness of these types of ads is that the publishers themselves have been experimenting with buying paid search and contextual ads to promote their own stories. NYTimes.com and Washingtonpost.com have both been pretty aggressive at using key words related to stories they want to promote.

Tim Ruder, vice president of marketing at WashingtonPost.Newsweek Interactive, told me they have promoted stories as well as sections of the site. The only problem is that as this method of promotion becomes more popular, the cost of key words will go up and it will lose its allure.

"We've seen that happen across the board within search," Ruder told me. "As it becomes more competitive, you make all this stuff based on return-on-investment decisions. The ability to make a healthy ROI is harder and harder as it becomes more competitive."

One ugly side effect of this promotion is when competitors end up promoting their news stories as a place to get more information on a rival site's ad box. While Ruder hasn't seen any NYTimes.com promotions come up on Washingtonpost.com, he did briefly see a Washingtonpost.com promo on a NYTimes.com page. But these are the type of glitches that are easily reported to Google or Yahoo, or fixed through filtering -- as long as you can keep up with all the pages served.

Ruder notes that Washingtonpost.com does already offer self-service ads for job listings and other classifieds but thinks the key word auctions at Google and Yahoo are a bit more complex to emulate. In the end, publishers of all sizes will have to weigh out how much return they'll get from automated contextual ads and whether it makes sense to split ad revenues with the tech companies.

The good, bad and ugly of contextual ads from Google, Yahoo

2008-04-04T03:16:00.000-07:00

Easy publishing tools for online journalists

2008-04-04T03:08:00.000-07:00

To help you learn some of these skills and start experimenting with online journalism, we’ve assembled a list of sites and programs that will help you quickly and easily begin using multimedia and the internet to advance your reporting and your storytelling. All of these applications are low-cost. Most are free, though some ask you to pay to access advanced functionality. All are free of spyware and adware, as far as we know (though it is always good to do an Internet search on anything you download and install to be sure). And each should make the work of creating great journalism online at least a little easier.

Blog and Content Management Systems

When it comes to quickly and easily putting the results of your reporting on the web, nothing is easier and more straightforward than using hosted blog sites like Blogger.com, TypePad.com and WordPress.com. Blog software is great for easy publishing, and it is flexible enough that you can use it to create all kinds of sites, not just the web journals for which it was originally designed. Any of these sites will allow you to get your journalism on the Internet quickly and easily, but each strikes a different balance between ease-of-use and power of features.
Blogger.com is a free blog site owned by Google and targeted at beginners and people who care more about the ease of getting their content on the Internet and less about fancy features, categories or configuration options. Each Blogger site is a list of uncategorized articles for which an RSS feed is automatically generated. You can have more than one site per login. The admin interface is simple, allowing you to configure archiving and how comments are handled and to pick a template. Google's AdSense is integrated so you can easily sign up for an AdSense account and have Google ads embedded in your blog. It is free, and setting up a site here takes about ten or fifteen minutes, tops (you want to at least take the time to pick a good name).

In fall 2006, Blogger unveiled a new beta version that lets users categorize posts and makes it easier to customize page layouts.

Near-Time Premium is a hosted, turn-key platform for online publishing that includes everything necessary to monetize content and develop an online community around that content.

For publishing companies and individual content owners, Near-Time presents a proven way to connect with readers, build community, and monetize content. For those already selling content online, Near-Time is a giant step forward that leverages Web 2.0 technologies, including: wikis, weblogs, RSS, e-mail integration, and file sharing. Advanced Roles and Permissions capabilities allow site administrators to control content, encourage interaction, and build communities.

Near-Time offers a free 60-day evaluation . Commercial plans begin at $25 per month. Publishers and authors who use Near-Time to sell content and build communities receive 80-90% of the revenue.

Typepad.com does a good job of balancing ease of use and powerful features. A Typepad account, which costs between $4.95 and $14.95 per month, gives you the configuration options and RSS feed offered by Blogger (minus automatic AdSense) plus many more features, all in a simple, straightforward administration application. With Typepad, you can categorize posts with as many custom categories as you want, though there is only one RSS feed for each blog. There are numerous templates to choose from and you can customize each using a drag-and-drop interface, then save different customized layouts so you can switch back and forth. If you want to integrate other sites, there are ready-made widgets that pull features from popular sites like Amazon.com, FeedBurner and del.icio.us. And you can not only allow others to blog on your site, you can choose whether or not their posts require approval.

WordPress.com is free and has some pretty advanced features for a hosted blog. WordPress supports hierarchical lists of categories (this means you can have sub-categories, and sub-categories of sub-categories) and creates an RSS feed for each category. It has built-in wizards for importing blog entries from other blog services (LiveJournal, Movable Type and TypePad, Blogger and Blogspot, and other instances of WordPress are supported) and exporting your data for use elsewhere. Users you allow to contribute can be assigned one of four roles, from Contributors, whose work must be approved before it goes live, to Administrators, who have all the access and power of your account. WordPress also allows you to upload attachment files and has built-in wizards for placing multimedia content in your blog. The only cost is a one-time $25 charge if you want the ability to manually update your site's CSS. So what's not to like? While the admin interface allows you to get a site up and running pretty easily, the software's administration application can be downright counterintuitive sometimes when you get into advanced configuration, and with so many features, it can be tough finding what you are looking for, especially when you first get started.

For a more in-depth comparison of blog software, check out OJR's review of blog software packages and chart of blog features.

If you are looking for a more robust CMS than a blogging tool, check out Drupal or Geeklog, two more open source CMS solutions.

Discussion Forums

phpBB is a free, popular and customizable discussion board. Simple Machines Forum is less popular but also free, powerful and customizable. Both require you to host them yourself, but almost any Web server will run PHP/MySQL applications like these.
Another, very powerful forum system is SlashCode, the system that powers Slashdot.org.

Major open-source forum packages like these attract communities of software developers, from which you can essentially get free tech support (just post your question on ... their forum, of course). The communities also typically offer a rainbow of free optional modifications to the software.

Keep in mind, though, that there are only so many people in these communities answering questions, and it is usually something they do in their spare time. Make sure to search through the other posts to see if your question has already been answered, and don't be discouraged if no one gets back to your first attempt at seeking help. Also be smart about installing free optional modifications to software - understand what you are installing and any risks it could pose to your system before you install.

Hosted, Unstructured Web pages

Google Pages allow you to post anything you want without restricting you to a blog format. If you would like to host your blog on your own web server you can choose from a lot of different web hosts that are suitable for blogs or any other type of website hosting.
Wiki.com, owned by Mindtouch, lets you set up a closed wiki for editing by you and anybody you designate. This can serve as a quick-and-dirty host for public information.

Making Multimedia

The easiest way to take advantage of multimedia in your online journalism is to learn how to create multimedia while you report, so you have all the images, video and audio you need when it comes time to pull together an online article. Once you have worked through OJR's wikis and you are comfortable shooting video and secure in the knowledge that writing for the web is not so different from writing for other mediums, you can begin to use these free BBC Training & Development Online Courses to refine your video and audio techniques.
For audio and podcasts, the article Create Podcasts Using Your PC from the O'Reilly Windows DevCenter site does a good job of demystifying podcasts (which are simply a combination of an mp3 file and an XML file) and gives a good overview of how to create one on a PC, with options for placing it on the internet. The instructions use the free open-source software packages Audacity and Lame MP3 Encoder, and since these are available for both Apple and Windows, this guide should also be usable by Mac users.

For Vodcasts, Vara Software has a tool that helps you sync your voice over (or read directly into the camera) much like a TelePrompTer.

Putting Pictures on the Web

Flickr.com lets you upload pictures, tag them (assign categories that you define), place them in groups called sets, and then serve them out to your blog or web site from Flickr. Sets can contain not only your own pictures, but also pictures of other users on the site, and once you have placed images and created sets in Flickr, you can link directly to the images or create an HTML- or Flash-based link to any of your sets, called a badge, that you can imbed in an article or web page. The Flickr software automatically creates RSS feeds for each of your sets and for pictures that have the same tag. Flickr accounts can also be configured to automatically blog photos to a whole bunch of blog types, including the three listed above.
In addition to serving out your pictures, Flickr also allows you to search by tags for other people’s pictures and include them in your web site or blog, and it includes your pictures in the site’s community, potentially creating publicity for you. Flickr, which is owned by Yahoo, is free, but the free account has limitations – you can only upload 20 MB of pictures a month, you can only have 3 photosets at a time, and flickr will store smaller resized versions of images. A pro account which removes many of these limitations costs $24.95 a year.

You can also search Flickr for royalty-free photos, if your Web site is non-commercial, to use as photo illusrations on stories or blog posts. Before republishing a photo, be sure to check the Creative Commons license of the photographer -- some reserve all rights. Also be sure to provide proper attribution.

If you are looking for a tool to edit your photos, Adobe Photoshop is the leading choice, but it is quite expensive. You can do much of the simple touch-up and cropping work one can do in Photoshop using a free online tool such as Picnik.

Putting Video on the Web

YouTube lets you upload video to its servers and add tags you define yourself, then gives you HTML that you can use to embed the video in a web page or blog post. Each video you put on the YouTube site has a permanent URL and code to embed it in a web page. If you want to tie a series of videos together, you can assign videos to channels you create. YouTube creates RSS feeds for videos by a given user and for a given tag. If you are looking for more advanced features or more nuanced feeds, you can take advantage of an active user community that has built some nifty tools (though you should make sure to search on the internet for problems or exploits involving any tools you download). And if you really want to dig in, there are Developer APIs into YouTube.

Creating RSS Feeds

Del.icio.us is a site that lets you store bookmarks to web sites, assign them terms (categories, like tags in flickr or YouTube), and then creates RSS feeds of your bookmarks, either en masse or by term. This allows you to create RSS feeds of anything on the Internet. If you have a place to host your audio files, you can link to them in Flickr and assign each bookmark the same term, and the resulting RSS will automatically generate a podcast feed (Del.icio.us automatically knows how to deal specially with certain media file types, like audio and video). Or if you create bookmarks to all the online content you find in researching an article – audio, video, PDF files, web pages, or any other type of file – and assign them all the same term, you can make a feed of your reporting. You could even keep updating the feed after you publish the article, if people remain interested. And for power users, Del.icio.us has a great page of third party tools and developer resources to help you push the site's limits.

E-mail Newsletters

If you've got an RSS feed, several companies will convert it to a lightly branded daily e-mail newsletter for free. Tell FeedBurner where your RSS feed lives, and you can sign up for one of the services it links to at its e-mail subscription page. The service will give you the code to put a "subscribe by e-mail" field on the sidebar of your blog.

HTML and CSS References

Any web journalist eventually has to become a web developer, whether it is because you want to embed some video or a picture or you need to adjust your site's CSS to get that annoying color of green off the front page, and good references help make the developer's life easier.
W3 Schools has good reference sites for both HTML and CSS, and has good tutorials on a range of web development technologies, as well. The HTML reference includes usage notes and provides lists of elements by name and function, attributes and events. The CSS Reference starts at the property level then lets you drill down to the values each property can contain and samples of formatting for each value.

For HTML, the iDocs site is another good reference and tutorial site. It is old, so a few things are outdated (don’t put element or attribute names in caps, for instance), but the entries include clear, succinct information on how and when to use each element, and I still use it whenever I need to understand HTML.

For CSS, a chart that lists CSS properties and the browsers that support them comes in handy when you have a tricky CSS bug in only one browser that you want to fix, and this CSS generator tool lets you create CSS classes by selecting appropriate values for each property in drop-downs. It can be used to generate the start of a complete stylesheet, or to simply generate valid CSS fragments for a style attribute you want to imbed somewhere in HTML.

And speaking of validity, the W3C's HTML Validator and CSS Validator are handy automated applications that can check your HTML pages and CSS stylesheets for common problems so you can at least see quickly if you have made a well-known error or violated standards.

How to make money on your news content website

2008-04-04T03:01:00.000-07:00

Forget what you might have heard: Journalists can earn money publishing online. Here are some tips.
This article is designed to help journalists learn how to make extra money, or even a full-time wage, by publishing independently online. It is not intended to provide an online revenue model for established news organizations. Heck, they've got business managers. They shouldn't need a wiki to show them what to do.
Content websites typically earn money through one of four ways:

Commissions / Affiliate links

Advertising networks

Selling your own ads

Paid content

Sponsorships/Grants
Once you have ads on your site, you will want to compute the eCPM (effective cost per thousand impressions) of revenue that each ad type is earning for you. You calculate eCPM by taking the total amount generated by an ad (or ad type), diving it by the number of pages on which that ad (or ad type) appears, then multiplying by 1,000. Let eCPM data help you decide which advertising type, layout and position work best for you.

Commissions / Affiliate links
Affiliate programs, such as Amazon.com's Associates Program, provided the first ways for early solo and small Web publishers to make a few bucks on their websites. In these programs, an online retailer will pay you, the publisher, a percentage on sales made after customers click through from your website to the retailer's site. Links can include traditional banner ads, search forms and links to individual products.
Because you only earn money when sales are made, affiliate programs will work best for you if your site's readers are consistently looking to make high-priced purchases -- for example, if you run a product review site. If you're interested in affiliate program, browse through merchant directories like Commission Junction and LinkShare to find retailers that offer products that fit your site's topic and audience.

Once registered with a merchant's program, you can create an ad or product link on your site using a snippet of Web code downloaded from the retailer. Some merchants go further and allow you to create virtual storefronts that match the design of your site, but where the retailer still handles all the inventory and commerce. Be careful setting up such arrangements -- unless you want customers coming to you for return and refund questions instead of to the retailer.

You'll want to note what percentage of a sale the retailer pays back to you, as well as the length of time after a sale that you get credit for the purchase. Some retailers limit credit to sales made on the initial click-through, but others will give credit for any sales made within a day or so. Also, some retailers will pay a commission on purchases you personally make after clicking your own links; others may kick you out of the program for doing that. Check a retailer's affiliate agreement and shop around for what you consider the best deal before putting links on your site.

Many publishers have found that links to individual products return more commissions than banner ads going to a retailer's home page. But the additional money those links earn might not be enough to justify the extra time that selecting and maintaining them requires.

Advertising networks
Most news websites earn the bulk of their money through advertising. But you don't need a sales staff to attract advertisers to your site. Ad networks can handle the sale and display of ads on your site. All you need do is drop a few lines of code into your Web pages where you want the ads to appear.
The most popular ad network for independent publishers is Google's AdSense program. AdSense is a "pay per click" (PPC) program, where you earn money each time one of your readers clicks on a Google-served ad. Since you earn money on clicks, rather than completed sales, PPC ad networks can provide a more reliable source of income for sites whose readers are not looking to make a purchase right away. Other notable PPC ad networks include the Yahoo! Publisher Network and Ad Voyager.

Most PPC ads are text, but some PPC networks also sell image and Flash ads. Ads are sold and displayed based on an auction system, where advertisers bid on selected keywords and phrases that appear on network websites. The ad network looks for webpages displaying its ad code, then matches what it determines the content of a webpage to be with the most appropriate keywords and phrases that advertisers have bid upon. The network then automatically weighs several factors in determining which ads to serve on the page, including the value of those bids; advertisers' remaining budgets for those bids; what percentage of readers have clicked on those ads in the past; and, in Google's case, the percentage of those readers who have made a purchase or read a designated number of pages on the advertiser's site.

Google's "Smart Pricing" program will adjust the amount paid to you for each click based on your readers' track record of making a purchase, or viewing a certain number of pages, on that particular advertiser's website. So if your site attracts motivated buyers, you remain in the best position to earn money.

Whatever you do, do not even think about clicking the ads on your site, or encouraging your readers to do the same. All PPC ad networks prohibit click fraud, and will boot from their program any publisher found to be inflating their number of clicks. Even well-intentioned discussion board participants can get a publisher booted from the program by encouraging other readers to click the ads to support the site. Google, for example, has suggested publishers concerned about their readers' conduct add this disclaimer to their site:

"Your postings to this site may not include incentives of any kind for other users to click on ads which are displayed on the site. This includes encouraging other readers to click on the ads or to visit the advertisers' sites, as well as drawing any undue attention to the ads. This activity is strictly prohibited in order to avoid potential inflation of advertiser costs."
If you don't think PPC ad networks will work for you because your site's target audience is defined by demographics, such as geography or a religious or political affiliation -- don't worry. Traditional ad networks such as BlogAds provide an alternative to the PPC networks. BlogAds sells its ads on a more traditional site-targeted model. Advertisers do not bid on keywords or phrases, but instead pay for their ads to be displayed a certain number of times on selected websites or groups of websites. BlogAds has become especially popular on political blogs, where advertisers can buy across a group of liberal or conservative weblogs.

Design to maximize online ad revenue

Since PPC ad networks target their ads primarily by topic, rather than geography or demographics, that makes these networks work better with niche topic websites than with sites that target their readers by geography or other demographics, such as gender, education, income or political affiliation.

For the system to work well for you, the PPC network's spiders must be able to determine a topic for each of your webpages and then must match keywords or phrases that advertisers have bid upon. That means the advantage goes to websites where each page covers a distinct and easily identifiable subject. So if you have a blog that covers a mishmash of topics on a single URL, you won't elicit the targeted ads that lead to high-paying clicks.

If you want to use PPC ad networks, organize your content to limit individual URLs to a specific topic. Break long blogs into individual entries. Archive old posts and stories by subject matter, not just by date and author. Stay active on discussion boards, keeping threads on topic and directing folks to more relevant pages should they stray toward other subjects. Use keywords in headlines, decks and URLs whenever possible. And spell out keywords, phrases and proper names on first reference, rather than using acronyms throughout the piece. (See, old fashioned copy editing rules *can* help you make money!)

Well-organized pages on individual topics also show up better in search engine results, attracting Web surfers curious about a specific keyword, who are more likely to click on a targeted ad. Publishers who create evergreen articles that are likely to attract a high number of links and clicks over time will do best in attracting search engine traffic to their ad-supported webpages. If you publish time-sensitive articles, which are not likely to have a long-enough shelf life to attract significant search engine traffic, consider swapping out or archiving articles on the same topic to a single URL, so that URL can get linked to and picked up in search results.

Where you place ads on a page affects how many of your users see them, and click. According to recent Google research, top performing ad formats include:

Large box ads placed in the middle of your main content column;

Skyscraper ads placed in a left-side column;

Leaderboard ads placed at the top and the bottom of the main content column.
Customize the ads' colors to match the background, type and navigational colors of your site, too, to eliminate "banner blindness" and maximize their visibility to your readers.
Then keep an eye on your ads to make sure that they remain relevant to your site. To a reader, ads -- like anything else on your pages -- are part of the content of your website. If an ad network fails to deliver consistently relevant ads, dump it and try something else. Respect your readers by not bombarding them with irrelevant advertising and they will respect you by continuing to read your site.

Think twice before installing pop-up, pop-under and screen "take-over" ads, too. Many readers steer clear of sites that block their access to the content they're looking for with aggressive advertising. Keep your website a safe haven for these ad-weary readers and you can build its audience over time.

How much traffic do you need?

With advertising, the more readers you have and page views you serve, the more money you can make. But how much traffic do you need to make a living from your website?

To make $36,500 a year, you'd need to earn $100 a day on your site (plus whatever expenses you incur). Let's assume your site is attractive to advertisers and earns $10 in ad revenue for every thousand page views. That would mean you'd need to serve 10,000 page views a day to meet this target. (And more if your site earns less than $10 per thousand page views.)

How can you attract that much traffic? If you are writing one article a day on subjects that will be out of date within 24 hours, it's going to be tough. You'll need to attract nearly 10,000 views each day for that's day article, since few people will bother reading your old, out-of-date work. If you write a fair number of "evergreen" features, which keep attracting page views long after they are written, you'll find the task much easier. If your site naturally deals with "perishable" news content, at least publish each day's new news to the same URL, overwriting or pushing down the old content, so that URL can build the in-bound links and search engine traffic that will help you attract new readers you need each day.

Reader-contributed content can also help you meet your page view goals. Well-managed, thoughtfully organized discussion boards and wikis can add dozens of new content pages a day to your site, with much less effort on your part than writing that many original articles.

Selling your own ads
If you don't want to share your ad revenue with a network, or if your site isn't the type to do well with PPC ads, you might consider selling space directly to advertisers.
First, you will need solid information about your site's visitors. Ultimately, what you are selling to advertisers is access to your readers, so you'd better know how many, and who, they are. A traffic tracking service like Google Analytics can provide accurate trafiic data that filters out hon-human traffic like search engine spiders and automated robots (which can account for up to 90 percent of a site's overall traffic). Make Money also provides reader tracking, along with some crude demographic information about your site's readers.

You should also consider conducting a survey of your readers, to get more detailed information about their demographics and behavior. SurveyMonkey provides easy-to-use tools to set up such surveys.

Once you have advertisers, you will need a system to serve and manage ads, such as OpenAds, as well as system to invoice your advertisers, such as Blinksale or PayPal. (PayPal's invoicing system does not require your advertisers to have a PayPal account, just a credit card.)

Set up a page on your site, linked from the header or footer, that provides data about your site's traffic and visitors, as well as a list of available ad packages. You might also provide a well-designed PDF version of the same data, as decision-makers often prefer "hard copy" versions of this information. (If you need free software to convert Word documents to PDFs, OpenOffice does this with a single mouse click.)

If your advertising page does not generate enough leads to support your site, you'll need to make cold calls to potential advertisers, via e-mail, phone or in person. You'll have the best luck with smaller businesses that do not place ads through agencies, but where the owner makes his or her own ad decisions.

Paid content
Given the variety and depth of information available on the Web, you have to provide truly unique content of high value to specific readers to get those readers to pay for it. The fact that a paid journalist wrote an article for you does not mean it's worth paying for to a reader. Detail-oriented publications such as Consumer Reports and Cook's Illustrated have had success selling the results of their independent testing online. And, of course, porn sites have been earning big bucks from paid content since the Web's earliest days. But general-interest publications, such as the Los Angeles Times, have found that walling off content to paid subscribers has generated less revenue than the company could have earned by selling advertising on freely available pages.
If you are certain that your content is unique and valuable enough that readers would be willing to pay for it, you'll need to select a way to handle payments from your readers. The system could be as easy as asking readers mail you a check in exchange for your putting them on e-mail content distribution list -- a method which offers the advantage of not requiring any advanced Web server security set-up. Or you could restrict access to certain folders on your website to readers whom you assign log-ins after they buy a subscription. Such restrictions are relatively easy to set up on Apache webservers. Payment can be handled manually via postal mail or phone, or automatically through an e-commerce storefront. (Many Web hosting packages include e-commerce storefronts.)

Sponsorships/Grants
Supporting a website through sponsorship or grants requires the least technical skill of these options, but the most interpersonal skills. You'll need to play the role of a salesperson, in addition to journalist and editor, in convincing a individual or organization to give you money to put up your site.
In either case, you'll need to identify individuals, or individuals within organizations, who might be willing to commit their money, or their organization's money, to your site. You'll need to make a written proposal, and often, an in-person pitch, and follow through until you secure your funding. Grants typically require a more structured application process than sponsorships, which can be sold through a formal solicitation or over drinks at the dinner table, depending upon whom you are working with.

The University of Iowa provides some guidance and a collection of links on grant writing in general, including links to many organizations which grant funds to researchers and publishers.

How to Get Your Computer to Boot Faster

2008-04-02T11:15:00.000-07:00

When I worked in a television news room, it took so long to boot up our computers that we were told to never turn them off in case the next shift needed them for a breaking story. Today I work primarily out of my home office. I used to consume a full cup of coffee every morning, waiting for my desktop to wake up, but I’ve found some time savers to share with you.

Step 1:
The biggest problem is that almost every time you install new software, it loads when you boot. I have applications that I rarely use like optical character recognition, and those I turn to several times a day like MS Outlook. By simply loading software only when you need it, you can cut your boot time significantly. To see what is loading now and to pick and choose in Windows XP click on your Start Menu. Go to Run. Type: msconfig. You’ll be presented with tabs. You’re probably operating under Normal Start Up which loads all device drivers and services. Choose Selective Startup instead. Under Selective Startup I’ve checked Process System.INI file, Process Win.INI.file, Load System Services, Load Startup Intems and Use Original Boot.INI. If you are an advanced user and you know what you are doing you can select or deselect these boxes as you choose. If you click everything except Services and then click disable all, followed by OK, you’ll end up booting in Safe Mode. Our goal here is to cut back on the Start Up programs. Click that tab. There you’ll find a long list of applications like ALCMTR and hpsysdrv. I took the time to enter each of them in Google to search for what they did. Sites like processlibrary.com proved useful in determining whether or not I should enable or disable the applications on booting. Right now I’ve only selected about a third of those listed. My machine boots faster and I’ve notice no lack of performance.

Step 2:
While you are in MS Config, look under the "BOOT.INI" tab. You will see a box labeled "Timeout." It is typically set to 30, which adds a half a minute delay. You can readily change it to 3 seconds. Close that tab, Click OK and reboot for the changes to take place. The first time you restart you’ll probably have a window pop up saying you’re in selective boot mode. You can disable the window while preserving your changes.

Step 3:
Make sure that you are not loading Trojans or ad ware when you boot. Not only should you keep your anti virus software up to date, you should load and install a spyware fighter like Lavasoft’s Ad Aware SE which is free for private use.

Step 4:
At least once a month, clear out your Internet temp files through your browser, empty your recycle bin, move unneeded files to a back up drive and perform a disc defragmentation. In My Computer, right click on your boot drive. Click on Properties, Go to Tools then defragment. This will take time, so don’t run any applications including screen savers while performing this task. When your files are closer together they’ll load faster.

Step 5:
Use Standby Mode. Since most of the boot time is used by loading programs, standby mode saves time by retaining those programs in memory. It saves power by shutting down the drives and monitors, the biggest power hogs. In control panel you can set up your computer to go into standby mode automatically after a certain amount of time. In Windows XP the standby option is presented to you when you choose to power down. Open documents and programs are stored in volatile memory. It’s a quick way to get active and I usually use it when I leave in the afternoons for a workout, however it’s useful to save everything before entering standby. If there’s a power outage your most recent changes will evaporate. I don’t use standby much longer than a couple of hours because my PC is quirky and will tend to exit standby on its own. Still it’s my only way to set up my computer to use the hard disc to record a television program.

Step 6:
Establish hibernate mode. A better choice for an overnight shut down is hibernation mode, which saves an image of your computer’s open applications and documents on your hard drive. If you go into your computer’s control panel, you can set this up so that you enter and leave hibernation by pushing your power switch. You can also establish hibernation after a fixed amount of time that your computer is unused. On your start menu access the Control Panel. Double click on Power Options. Click on the Hibernate tab to enable Hibernation. Choose your options then click OK. When you decide to leave your computer for the day, go through the start menu and click Turn Off Computer. By holding down your shift key, a new Hibernate option will appear. Click on it and your computer will snooze, coming back a lot faster than before when you need it.

Tips & Warnings
When I used hibernate mode, my computer sometimes came back on by itself. Since my computer and all my peripherals are plugged into a surge protector, I now take the additional step of powering it down before walking away from the machine.
If you power down your computer in standby with an external device, you will reboot from scratch when you resume

How to write your Life Story

2008-04-02T11:12:00.000-07:00

Your life is not dull and boring! It may seem dull to you, but other people think the same thing about themselves. It's a little like the concept of "one man's trash is another man's treasure." We each lead different lives, and what we live can be very interesting to someone else. So get out your pen and paper or your computer and have a go at writing about your life!

Things You’ll Need:
Computer with word-processing program
Pad of paper and pen
Your memories
Step 1:
First things first - In a notebook, write down the particulars about yourself. When you were born, where, how much you weighed, what time it was when you came into the world, what your parents names are/were.

Step 2:
Add to your pages from your first memories. Maybe it was something that happened to you your first day at school, maybe it was something your parents taught you. Write it down.

Step 3:
Add to that. Describe your family the way you see them. List your siblings, your cousins, aunts and uncles, grandparents, great-grandparents, etc.

Step 4:
Begin by thinking about things that mean something to you. Think about your schools and the friends you have had. What bad things have happened to you? What good things? What role does religion play in your life? What unusual places have you been? You can fill a notebook in no time at all.

Step 5:
The next step is to organize all your information. Are you going to write a novel from your memoirs? If so you will have to fictionalize the people you know and make them into characters that others won't recognise.

Tips & Warnings
When you think of something to add to your notebook, don't hesitate to do it, because the memory might slip away from you.
Keep a journal and write in it every day

How to Make Money Writing Booklets

2008-04-02T11:09:00.000-07:00

Writing booklets can be a rewarding way to pass along information that you are passionate about. It is also a fantastic residual income source that will last as long as you want it to be there

Things You’ll Need:
computer
internet access
credit card
Step 1:
Decide What You Want to Communicate: You need to consider two factors in this step. Identify the topic that you want to write about and then have a clear understanding of what makes you qualified to write about it.

Step 2:
Identify Your Audience: Make sure you know who will most benefit from your booklet and why they would want to read it. Then figure out the best way to communicate your message to that audience.

Step 3:
Write The Booklet(s): Start by writing out a section or chapter outline. Then begin to fill in the content of the sections. Don't forget to write front and back matter such as introduction, table of contents, and conclusion. Be sure to proof read the booklet carefully and even hire an editor if you can afford it.

Step 4:
Design the Cover: You want the book cover to be attractive and applicable. You can design the cover yourself, ask a friend to do it for you, or hire a graphic designer for the task. If you decide to publish it with a self-publishing company they may have their own designers or stock covers for your use.

Step 5:
Decide How Official You Want the Booklet to be: There are a number of things you can do to legitimize your writing. You can apply for a Copyright (Copyright.gov), an ISBN # (isbn.org) to sell it in bookstores, a Library of Congress # (loc.gov), and a Bar Code (barcode-us.com).

Step 6:
Publish the Booklet: You can print the booklets yourself, take them to a copy shop to print them, or you can have an outside company print them for you. Do an internet search for "booklet printing" and for "self-publishing" and study the results. This step is dependant on your overall budget.

Step 7:
Create an eCommerce Website: There are a lot of ways you can do this. You can pay a company to do it for you or you can do it yourself with the user friendly tools that are available nowadays. Do an internet search for "eCommerce website" and research the options out there. Then speak with someone at the company and tell them what you need.

Step 8:

Speaking Engagements are a great way to sell your books. Market Your Booklets: Blog about your booklets. Tell your friends about them. Put a link to your website at the bottom of all your emails. Do "search advertising" for your website for the "key words" that apply to your book. Give some to the heads of groups and organizations with similar interests to your content. Offer to speak to groups for free.

Tips & Warnings
Spend a lot of time on steps 1 and 2.
Writing the book is the easy part. Marketing the booklet is the hard part.
Set realistic expectations, selling books often starts off slowly and takes time to pick up speed.
If you go with a self-publishing company, be sure to check them out thoroughly and understand exactly what you are responsible for and what they are responsible for.

How to defeat writers block

2008-04-02T11:06:00.000-07:00

Writers block is a common "disease" among the human population. It plagues us from when we start writing, when we go to school, and sometimes when we are at work. Unless your natural at writing, it is eventually going to happen one way or another!

Things You’ll Need:
pen/pencil
Paper
Friends/people in general
Lots of brain power
Step 1:
First brainstorm on paper about something you want to write, even if it comes out as nonsense! The best part of being a writer is think that you can write about anything you want, that your choices are infinite! Choose something that may make you want to build your own world, or maybe perhaps help someone, or just make plain sense!

Step 2:
Still can't come up with an idea of what to write about? Talk to friends/family, even someone you don't know! There is bound to be a subject that intrigues you that makes you want to learn or write about it.

Step 3:
Many of us get stuck in the middle of writing. It is a time when most of us get frustrated. Take a 10-20 min break to let your brain collect itself from all the tiresome writing. Have someone else edit the paper while your at it! Getting some feedback from someone may help you get right back on track!

Step 4:
For some of us who can't organize so much using or left brain or the "more logical" part of our brain, draw a picture. there is a saying that one picture may say a 1000 words. Get a perspective on what your writing through color, the thought of something in the picture, maybe even the emotion the visual gives you.

Tips & Warnings
Always, Always, ALWAYS, have someone else help you edit! No one is perfect, but it usually helps!
Caution: Don't get used to taking to many breaks at one time! You might get lazy from writing, or rather yet get discouraged from feeling like you can't do it at all. Just find something that will motivate you, whether it be a though that you have, or an issue that you see!

How to Find an Intern to Work for You

2008-04-02T08:31:00.000-07:00

Having an intern can be great. An enthusiastic student adds energy to the workplace while they are doing valuable work. Interns can spread the word that your company is a great place to work. Interns can also be nurtured and mentored so that you want to hire them full-time when they finish school. Read on to learn more

Step 1:
Identify a project that you want an intern to do. The best ones are specific and have a beginning and end. The person who will supervise the intern should be involved in this description.

Step 2:
Make a list of the local schools that have programs in the field that you need knowledge in. You can find the list from college guides or any local directory.

Step 3:
Contact the career or job placement office of the school and ask if they have job postings for interns. Some schools have internship coordinators.

Step 4:
Post your internship and follow up with all candidates. You want to make a good impression at the school with everyone who applies. If you don’t reply to students or don’t treat them professionally word will get around and students won’t want to apply for your internships.

Step 5:
Develop a relationship with someone in the placement office or the internship coordinator. Invite them to see your workplace and learn more about your company. If they think it’s a great place to work they will refer students directly for your internships.

Step 6:
Volunteer to guest lecture for a class. Choose the subject matter that meets your needs for an intern. Once you are in front of a class you can see students in action and ask them individually or as a group. If it meets the needs of a class you could also offer to hold a class at your company and give the students a tour.

Step 7:
Identify schools in other geographic areas that place interns for specific types of work or summer positions. Again you start with a guide to colleges where you will find schools that have work or internship requirements. The school you went to is also a good place to look.

How to Identify Your Target Market

2008-04-02T08:25:00.000-07:00

The creation of a quality product is not enough to vault your business to the top of your industry. You need to identify your target market, whether it is a specific geographical location or a particular age group interested in your products. When you identify your target market, you minimize wasted funds and develop a customer base that can sustain your business for years to come.

Find the Right Customers for Your Business
Step 1:
Utilize focus groups to determine which demographic groups and markets find your products appealing. A focus group is essentially an interview between a member of your company and 6 to 12 average consumers about the quality of your products and services. Review typical focus group questions and activities at websites like Free Management Library (see Resources below).

Step 2:
Travel to competing stores and businesses to do some preliminary market research. You should keep a particular eye on the types of products that consumers are interested in. This inexpensive form of market research helps you determine where marketing efforts and demographic groups meet in real life.

Step 3:
Aim your initial marketing efforts at a variety of consumers through the use of guerrilla marketing. Guerrilla marketing efforts include street teams that raise awareness of a particular business and impromptu events in public areas involving your products. You can determine which markets find your advertising most appealing while developing new markets through this innovative marketing tool.

Step 4:
Send out online surveys to past customers to gauge their satisfaction with your service. You should include optional demographic questions like age, income level and profession in order to gain insight into which markets are most successful.

Step 5:
Speak with friends, family and colleagues in different demographic groups about your products. This informal market research should yield a frank discussion of why your product fails in certain markets while you identify groups that are not being reached by your advertising.

Step 6:
Assess and identify how your product will grow with your target markets and demographic groups over the next few years. You should discuss whether your product is applicable across a variety of age groups. The result of this discussion should be a decision about whether your product should be broadened to help more consumers or narrowed to secure new consumers in a specific market.

How to Advertise Your Business for Free

2008-04-02T08:20:00.000-07:00

Things You’ll Need:
Internet access
Step 1:
Use Craiglist. It's widely used and it's free (see Resources below).

Step 2:
Work for credit. This will help build your connections, portfolio, etc. This is one of the best way to build references for future paying clients.

Step 3:
Use myspace.com to promote your business (see Resources below). It's free!

Step 4:
Create your own flyers. Post them wherever you can. Make sure you get permission before you post!

Step 5:
Get free business cards at vistaprint.com (see Resources below).

Step 6:
Join a networking group like meetup.com (see Resources below). Attend the meetings and distribute your company information.

How to Manage your Time Effectively

2008-04-02T08:18:00.000-07:00

Effective time management comes instinctively to some people and yet others struggle with tardiness. If you or someone close to you falls into the latter category, this article will offer help to understand and cope.

Things You’ll Need:
alarm clock
watch or cell phone with alarm setting
Step 1:
To better understand time management we must first address the concept of time itself. It may seem that time is a universal standard Earth wide; dictated by forces untouchable by man. For the purposes of human daily life we measure time by the Earth's rotation. Although this may be scientifically correct, we must now take into consideration cultural influence and individual interpretation. Modern American society operates on a strict time schedule whereas other nations such as Mexico have a much more lenient approach.

Step 2:
Narrow the field even more to identify individual's concepts of time management and what might be considered mismanagement. Person's who are prompt the majority of the time and with minimal effort are likely to fall into the category of "time oriented". They intuitively keep close track of time and how it relates to their activities.

Step 3:
Other people are "task oriented". They focus their efforts to the task at hand and must make a conscious effort to check the time. Even then, they do not instinctively grasp the association of the time verses the current or upcoming activity. An hour may have passed and it may seem to have been only a few minutes.

Step 4:
Recognizing this trait is half the battle. The next step is making minor adjustments in daily activities such as: a. Having friends, family and coworkers help keep track of time. b. Use alarm clocks throughout the day to monitor sessions of time. c. Set clocks ahead by 10 minutes to help offset minor delays. Remember to focus on intentions rather than tardiness and with some effort and practice, it is possible for most persons to learn time management skills.

How to avoid work from home scams

2008-04-02T08:11:00.000-07:00

We have busy schedules, and so many things we need to do. Working from home seems like a great option for work, because if gives you comfort, flexibility and may save you money in what seems like endless commutes. To new parents, it allows them to spend time at home with their kids, while not letting go of their careers. These endless advantages make an increasing amount of people look for such opportunities on a daily basis. However, this leads to increasing opportunities for people trying to pull a scam. Follow these tips to find your next legitimate work from home gig.

Step 1:
The biggest red flag is obviously "Make (an incredible amount of money) in one day!!!" This does not happen. If it was that easy making so much money from home, no one would be working at an office and everyone would have an incredible amount of money. Never fall for this. It is not true, and will not happen.

Step 2:
This tip is rather obvious, but it seems a lot of people still believe that the ideal job will find them through an email. Great companies have people lining up trying to work for them. If they find you a candidate so exceptional that they are willing to contact you, they will never do so by email. Never believe a junk email offer you get. No legitimate company will ever get through to a prospective employee by email.

Step 3:
Again, another obvious one is: you pay them to work. They will disguise this as "supply" costs or a small sum for them to send you a client list or something to this effect. Never fall for that. The company wants you to work for them, they will give you all the necessary tools for you to perform your job well. You do not buy those tools. Have you ever heard of someone starting at an office and paying for their stapler or paper or pencils? Same principle, it just doesn't happen.

Step 4:
The name of the job is: "WORK FROM HOME." If you are to work from home, you still need a legitimate job title, such as Finance Controller or something to that effect. No legitimate job will advertise itself as "WORK FROM HOME."

Step 5:
Experience and resume are not required. This is just not right. No one will hire a candidate not suitable for the job. If they don't ask for experience or a resume, then chances are, it's a scam. Beware.

Step 6:
If you ask for a job desciption all you get is work from home. You need a job description in order to know whether you are suitable for the role or not.

How to Become a Travel Agent & Entrepreneur with Your Own Travel Website

2008-04-02T07:56:00.000-07:00

You do not need to be an internet genius to have success with a web-based business. With a niche like travel, everyone has an interest. And you own a business selling excitement, discovery and memories that others will treasure for a lifetime.

Things You’ll Need:
· Internet Access
· Start-up fee, $500.00
· Name of your travel business
· Interest in travel
· Belief in yourself

(A) :
Get the best rates by combining 3 Travel Search Engines
Research: Each year, travel is a 7 trillion dollar business worldwide. The trend is to search for your best deals over the internet and make the bookings yourself. If you are looking to be a travel entrepreneur, you will need to get started owning your own web-based travel business. First, you need to see the quality of a combined Travelocity/Expedia/Priceline powered search engine and website that will have your business name on it. Visit www.ChicTravelDeals.com and/or www.TravelGems4Less.com. These websites are examples of what your travel store will look like once you are up and running.

(B):
An easy to remember travel name is a great marketing tool
Choose your company name. You should find a name that can be easily accessed on the internet that has not already been taken. Yahoo is a good source for finding domain names. If you can choose a company name that has the exact available domain name, find a web hosting site and purchase that domain name for your company.

(C):

The more you research your business beforehand, the better agent you will become
More research: Access www.ytb.com/ChicTravelDeals and click on the company presentation. If you are going to be working with a travel company to provide your website, you need to know what else they can provide for you. With YTB, you actually get more than one website booking engine. Along with the main travel site, you get a specialized golf vacation site (see www.19thHoleGolfVacations.com), a floral site (see www.ytbflowers.com/chictraveldeals), new member sponsor site (see www.ytb.com/chictraveldeals) as well as access to booking event and theme park tickets, car rentals, car purchase programs, honeymoon registry, and passport services.. just to name a few. This is all inclusive as part of your travel business and can help market your services to clients as a one stop travel concierge.

(D):

Get started with your own online travel franchise
After viewing the presentation, click on Join Today, and confirm your sponsor. Your sponsor will assist you with questions that come up and be a mentor to you to get the most out of your business. Think of your sponsor as your personal travel business coach. Not only can your sponsor point you in the right business direction, but you will have access to travel agent training and weekly phone conference training calls that will assist you in building your business. If you miss a phone conference, you can easily access past calls in your online back office and listen to them as many times as you wish. YTB also offers huge conferences and seminars that can help you get to know your travel vendors as well as improve your personal travel agent skills.

(E):

Get the most out of your investment
Choose to become a RTA (referring travel agent) and a REP (representative). This choice allows you the most access to expanding your business and the potential to make the most money. Then simply follow the prompts to confirm your order and within minutes your website is up and running!

(F):

Start marketing your business to everyone who travels
Market your new business. Who do you know that travels? Most everyone does at some point. You have many choices to bring traffic to your website. Business cards are a great start. Email all your contacts to tell them about your new website that can get them the same, if not better rates than using the other big named sites. Inform them that they can book airfare, cruises, hotels, golf tee times, flowers, event tickets, and other services all on your travel store. It is truly a one stop travel concierge.

(g):

Enjoy your new business
Expect checks. You now own a passive business that allows others to do the work of booking services on your website. You make 60% of the commission for each purchase. Continue to market your business to everyone you meet. It's great to have a personal website that has so much to offer in the travel industry that is quick, easy and saves people money. You can offer that now. Grow your business and the more people you reach, the more will use your website to travel!

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2008-03-26T01:15:00.000-07:00

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2007-08-24T05:43:00.000-07:00

Hi there,

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2007-08-21T04:49:00.000-07:00

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Robert kiyosaki's point

2007-08-17T07:55:00.000-07:00

Did you see the Oprah Winfrey Show? Are you going to Finish Rich?
David Bach states in his book: "Start late, finish rich."
He recommends several ways people can accomplish this, including through developing a Network Marketing home based business. If you would have suggested such a thing to me 15 years ago, chances are I would have thrown you out of my home. My fault... and I owe a very sincere apology to this industry which may be the only salvation many boomers, gen-x's, and gen-y's have in the years ahead.
It took me more than a decade to "wake up" and realize how far Network Marketing has come since it became a viable business model more than 50 years ago. No longer the "garage-full-of-products" antiquated system of its early days... thanks to communication tools such as the Internet and residential delivery methods like "big brown" ...anyone, regardless of education level, skill, or experience, can operate a global business from the comforts of home by tapping into the right Networking oportunity.
Whether it's for a secondary income or a primary source of income, it just makes sense to build one ...if nothing else than for the significant positive tax consequences... and I gotta tell 'ya, based on everything I'm hearing, every tax advantage you can grab onto in the coming years will be necessary.
Now, that doesn't mean run out there and sign up with the first Networking opportunity you can find. After all, some are not opportunities at all ...far from it... but they manage to sneak under the radar to "pose" as an opportunity ...at least, until they get caught. That's a shame, really, because they bring a bad name to an industry that has come such a long way, an industry that has already created so many independently wealthy individuals --- too numorous to count.
Look, whether you choose Network Marketing, or another plan, the fact is --- YOU MUST HAVE A PLAN!
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Sincerely,
Robert KiyosakiBest Selling AuthorRich Dad Poor DadThe Perfect Business